


don’t fear the reaper

by theroyalsavage



Category: Percy Jackson and the Olympians - Rick Riordan, The Heroes of Olympus - Rick Riordan
Genre: Also Piper may or may not be God stay tuned, Alternate Universe - Goblin, Alternate Universe - Modern with Magic, M/M, Non-Graphic Violence, Now with more percabeth than initially expected, Urban Fantasy
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-02-15
Updated: 2017-08-02
Packaged: 2018-09-24 17:57:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 29,276
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9777809
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theroyalsavage/pseuds/theroyalsavage
Summary: Legends tell of a valiant warrior, blessed by the divine, betrayed by the leader he fought so hard to serve, locked into an eternal half-life. Called "goblin," this man lives forever, watching the years pass him by, until his fated other half can release him.(It’s funny, Nico thinks. They say legends are always a little true.)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> reformatted from a one-shot to a multichap! also rewritten a bit (a lot) because i cannot help myself
> 
> if you like to have music in the background while you read, please please please listen to [this album](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0S2KeLD-Tw)! it was quite literally made for this au and it's honestly super beautiful
> 
> edit: now featuring [some gorgeous fanart](https://pm-patata.tumblr.com/post/158699083994/i-always-wanted-to-draw-some-fan-art-from)!! i died and am dead

**107 CE**

General Nico di Angelo is killed at noontime, under a sky as blue as his lover’s eyes.

It happens like this, like divine retribution for the scarlet guilt he keeps pressed between his fingers. He returns from the war triumphant and blood-stained, followed by a legion of adoring soldiers. Whispers of divinity trail in his wake, whispers of spirits, of blessings, of death. His name has spread across the continent, passed between enemy lips, like a promise. A warning.

Nico hears them talk. They say he walks with gods. That his sword - jet-black and cruel, carved with the face of a hellhound - belonged to the divinity Themself. That to look into his eyes is a death sentence.

_If the fates abandon you, and you meet the man with clothes like midnight and a sword red with blood, turn back, turn back._

_You will not survive him_.

“Pay them no mind, General,” his lieutenant tells him, just as blunt and matter-of-fact as she always is. “They fear you, and men have a need to name their fears. Maybe it’s even an honor, to be compared to the gods.”

“It is unlucky,” Nico responds sharply, his fingers tight around the hilt of his sword. “The gods do not take kindly to comparisons.”

The whispers follow him on his trek back from the border to the palace. They stretch from the scarlet-crimson-rust-covered battlefields of the war, to the mountains and the sea, and back again to the capitol, where they fall into the emperor’s waiting ears. And Nico is a fool. A fool.

Blind.

This world’s best kept secret is that the jealousy of a sovereign is the sharpest sword of them all.

_(You will not survive him_.)

It’s ironic, Nico thinks, on his knees in front of the emperor he has fought so hard to serve, his own sword in his gut, his own blood dripping onto his hands. Ironic that Nico was the one not to survive, after all.

Beside him, he watches as his lieutenant is cut down, a soft gasp of horror cutting off in her throat, the light fading in her eyes (gray like the morning, gray like the dawn) as blood drips down her chin.

“You should have known,” the emperor says, above him, and Nico should’ve. He should’ve.

He should’ve.

He coughs, and it shakes his entire body. Rattles his soul.

“I will not apologize, Highness,” he rasps, and the emperor scoffs. His face is cold and jagged, from this angle. Sharp, like Nico’s sword.

“It matters not. Apologies mean nothing from the dead.”

“I have committed no crime.”

“You committed treason,” the emperor drawls, and he tosses a letter onto the ground, covered in Nico’s handwriting. Addressed to the prince.

Behind the emperor, there is a flurry of movement, a soft, shocked gasp. Nico lets himself look up, lets himself meet a pair of blue, blue, blue eyes. Just for a moment. The world is becoming fuzzy. His mouth tastes like mud.

“If you want to kill me, kill me,” Nico wheezes. “We both know this letter is not your reason.” But the vitriol in his tone is stifled by the nauseating heat bubbling in his stomach. The burn is almost unbearable now, and his vision is turning black.

“Oh?” the emperor says, his voice dipping low, dangerous. “And what _is_ , General?”

“You have always,” Nico says, “been afraid of the gods.”

The emperor spits at his feet.

The sky spins, blue, blue, blue, over his head.

The prince says, in a tone of flat disinterest, vague disgust, “Brother, please end this.”

Nico dies.

* * *

 

Death, it transpires, is far from peaceful.

Nico’s head spins with sounds, screams, prayers, his own name. People, speaking in languages he does not recognize but somehow still understands. A hundred thousand voices, pressing down on his brain, on his shoulders, on his lungs. It is a chaos he is fated to spend eternity enveloped in, a discord that drums along to the heartbeat of humanity. He is dead but he is not, rooted in place by the sword jutting up from between his ribs, he is spinning spinning spinning surrounded by stars, the taste of blood in his mouth, pulse pounding in his ears-

He wakes up in the middle of a field, an odd, burning feeling inside his limbs. Beside him, a familiar voice chants in prayer. He hears it with his ears, and he also hears it in his head.

Strange.

“Divinity, please be with our General as he passes into the next life. General, forgive me. Forgive _us_. Find peace.”

Peace, Nico thinks.

And then he sits up.

The old man kneeling next to him goes still, eyes wide and shocked. Nico recognizes him from his own household, one of the elders who has been standing with one foot upon Death’s threshold for a long time now. His voice crumbles from a prayer into a cough, and the little boy crouching beside him is quick to put an arm around his shoulders, offering a sip of water from a wineskin. “ _Grandpa_ ,” the boy says, his voice high and worried, but the old man shakes him off.

“General,” he cries, reverently. “ _How_?” And then, something fearful twisting the wrinkles of his face, “Oh, no.”

“Oh, no,” Nico agrees. He gets to his feet, looks down at his stomach, where his sword still protrudes from what was once an open wound. The weapon glows blue, thin, wispy flames flickering up from the blade. Nico closes his hand around the hilt and tries to pull it out, but all it does is make his stomach turn and flare with that awful, itchy heat.

“Goblin,” the little boy says.

It feels like a death sentence.

_Goblin_.

No.

“Shhh,” the old man hisses to the boy in reproach, but Nico shakes his head, wordlessly. Holds up one hand.

He thinks _fire_ and his hand goes up in flames.

He thinks _ice_ and watches his fingers frost over, pale blue and lacy-intricate.

He thinks _sword_ and suddenly there is a weapon in his hand, heavy and honest. Truer than men, Nico thinks.

The old man recoils, but the little boy’s eyes go wide, and he leans in a little to inspect the sword. He’s gangly for his age, with a round face and warm brown skin and a dimple deep in one cheek. Nico twists the sword in his hand once before holding it out for the boy to see.

“Amazing,” the boy mutters.

The old man shakes his head, places a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “General, please. It’s bad luck.”

“I think,” Nico says, softly, “it’s a little too late for luck, now.”

And it is. Oh, it is. Because Nico knows what this means. What it means to have power where there should be none, what it means to have life where there should be only death.

“General. You must find your bride,” the old man wheezes, thumping a little on his chest to clear the cough from his airway. “She is the only one who will be able to remove that sword and set your soul to rest.”

“ _She_ ,” Nico repeats, his voice dripping in something that makes the old man go silent and the little boy frown, a wrinkle forming between his eyebrows.

A goblin.

A little too late for luck, now.

“The rumors, then…” the old man begins.

Nico’s hands close into fists.

The old man and the little boy help Nico to his feet and then, once he’s feeling stable enough to walk, back to his estate. They do not remain in the shadow of the palace long, though. Fate is a fickle thing, and just as she had sent the old man to Nico in a moment of kindness, she takes him away just as quickly. Just before he passes away, he presses the boy’s hand into Nico’s and tells him to serve Nico well.

“I will,” the boy promises, swallowing tears. “Our _family_ will. I swear my lineage will stand by the Goblin’s side for as long as he lives.”

A blue glow rises around their clasped hands, and Nico watches decades, centuries, flash in front of his eyes - a millennia of humans with this old man’s name and this little boy’s smile, who grow old and die and are born again and again and again to stay at Nico’s side.

“I think,” Nico says, hesitantly, “your progeny may not thank you for this, Samuel Valdez.”

“I guess we’ll have to find out,” the boy answers, with a small, wobbly smile.

They leave that night, under the cover of darkness, on a jet-black ship tossed by a storm. Nico stands alone on the deck and watches the grandeur of the emperor’s castle grow small, faintly ghoulish in the light of the moon. The little boy sniffles and whispers his grandfather’s name.

The moon grins at Nico, a cruel, lopsided sort of smile.

He promises himself he will never go back.

* * *

 

One year passes.

Then two.

Five.

Ten.

A hundred.

A thousand.

(Time tastes different on the tongue when you cannot die.)

Nico moves around a lot, dragging the Valdez family in his wake. He tells himself that people and places grow tedious and slow over the decades, assures himself that it’s just a matter of wanting to see everything, since he’s got the time. Oslo, Seoul, Beijing, Seattle, Marseilles, Vienna, Hong Kong, New York. He knows, though, and he knows the Valdezes do, too. That he’s still looking.

That they all are.

Times change, and even though Nico is stuck between seconds, trapped in the moment he died, he adapts. He transitions from the ceremonial robes of an imperial general to the unadorned tunic of a peasant to the armor of a soldier to the suit of a businessman. To the Valdezes, he changes from grandfather to uncle to friend to nephew to grandson, and then, finally, to mourner. He watches generation after generation of them grow and learn and love and then die, and he carries the memories with him.

All of them.

Nico has never, ever forgotten a single face that he has lost.

That, he thinks, is his curse.

* * *

 

**1996**

It is snowing in New York City.

Nico sits with his feet dangling off the side of a neon sign, perched improbably on top of a skyscraper. His breath billows up in front of him, clouds chasing shapes up into the night sky. His knees, visible through holes torn in his black skinny jeans, are freezing with a sharp kind of cold. There’s a can of cheap beer in his hand that tastes like spit, and Nico tips his head back to watch the snow spin dizzyingly above him.

He thinks about heading home - Esperanza is probably worried - but the voices are especially loud tonight, and it always gets worse when he’s indoors.

A snowflake lands on his knee, high-definition against the black fabric.

One of the voices inside his head disentangles itself, abruptly, from the rest.

_Please_ , it says. _Someone. God, whatever deity. If you’re out there, please. I can’t die. Please don’t let me die_.

Nico closes his eyes, takes another swig of his beer, which is nasty enough to make the bridge of his nose wrinkle. It’s a woman speaking, he thinks, although oftentimes it’s hard to tell. And there’s something different about this one. Something that tugs at him.

Something that won’t _let him enjoy his goddamn beer in peace_.

Sighing heavily, Nico sets the can aside - it’s mostly finished anyway, and it really does taste like piss - stands up, rolls his head on his neck once, and steps off the edge of the building.

There’s a second during which air rushes by him, and then that familiar burning kicks in, and the air becomes viscous and dark around him. Space seems to shudder, to wrinkle and fold, and then suddenly he is appearing in the middle of a parking lot, smoke curling away from him, shadow-black. He sees the car squeal away, sees the woman lying on the pavement, sees the way her blood stains the snow around her bright, bright, bright.

Something coppery-cloying knocks on Nico’s memories. He smothers it down.

When he walks closer, the woman looks up at him. She’s pretty, blond, freckled. Blue eyes. “Please,” she says, her voice broken.

Nico blinks.

“Please,” she repeats, reaching a shaking hand out in Nico’s direction. “Help me. Save me. _Please_.”

Nico says, quietly, “You’re not asking for you, are you?”

Her hand comes down slowly, to rest on her stomach. “No,” she chokes. “I’m not. I swear.”

“All right,” Nico says. “Okay, then. Looks like I’ll be your deity tonight, ma’am.” And he crouches down and passes his hand over her eyes. She trembles, then stills, and Nico feels her energy settle, tether itself once again to her body.

That woman lives, and so does her son. Nico doesn’t stick around at the hospital long enough to find out the boy’s name, or to spot the strange, amorphous marking on the back of his neck, the same color blue as Nico’s flames. He does not listen to the whispers, does not notice the way ghosts begin to flock to the newborn’s side, all of them with the same word on their lips.

(Bride.)

There is no such thing as _fate_.

* * *

 

After Nico leaves the hospital, his feet lead him back to the site of the crash. He follows his footprints into the parking lot, the scarlet red of the woman’s blood blooming bright against the blank nothing of the snow. It’s strange, Nico thinks. It smells like cherry blossoms, a bit.

He looks up in time to watch a petal fall instead of a snowflake.

His eyes follow it until, midair, it stops.

Across the parking lot, the air ripples.

Nico goes still, his eyes narrowing, as he watches a man in black materialize on the street corner in a strange, languidly curling puff of black smoke. He’s holding a clipboard at his side, a wide-brimmed, black hat pulled low over the mess of oil-spill hair on his head. Nico sees the familiar arc of his smile, scythe-like below the brim of his hat.

The air is still. Icy cold.

“General,” the man says. “What a pleasant surprise. It’s been… what? Decades?”

“More like centuries,” Nico mutters. “I was enjoying it.”

“That’s a bit mean, don’t you think, Nico?”

“Honest,” Nico corrects, grimly. “Hello again, Reaper.”

The Reaper inclines his head before stepping forward until he’s toeing the edge of the pool of blood that woman left behind. “You’ve meddled again. I thought you’d sworn off it. After last time-”

“I didn’t meddle,” Nico says, through gritted teeth. “I _helped_. She was still alive.”

“Maybe,” the Reaper says, tilting his head. Nico catches a flash of the storm-tossed sea green of his eyes before he’s looking down again, consulting the clipboard in his hands. “But she was _meant_ to die. All you’ve done is buy her time.”

“Human life is all borrowed time anyway,” Nico says, and he shrugs, and he turns to go, but the Reaper shakes his head.

“Her name is down, Nico. The kid’s on here, too. They’re missing souls, now. When I find them, I have to take them.”

Nico pauses. Sighs. Looks over his shoulder.

Meets sea-green eyes.

“So don’t find them, then,” he says, tired, and now he’s really leaving, following his own footprints out of the parking lot and into the street.

“It’s not that easy,” the Reaper calls after him. “You and I both know the universe doesn’t take lightly to people meddling in the balance of life and death, Nico.”

Nico halts. Flexes his fingers. Thinks about his beer, abandoned on the top of a skyscraper.

“You more than anyone, I’d think, Reaper.”

By the time Nico turns around, Percy Jackson is gone.


	2. Chapter 2

**2017**

Smartphones, Nico thinks, are without a doubt the _worst_ invention known to man. For evidence A, he would direct you to his own, which has buzzed forty-three times and counting in the last minute and a half. Nico scrolls through the text notifications without unlocking his phone, rolling his eyes so far back in his skull he’s pretty sure he’ll be able to see his brain soon.

 **asshole:** dude where tf r u

 **asshole:** nico. neeks. nikola tesla. nearly headless nick. saint nick.

 **asshole:** uncle come oN i know ur getting these u dont know how to turn ur phone off

 **asshole:** gramps says he’s taking my card away??? and that u AGREE w him??? dude. bro. what did i ever do to u

 **asshole:** i thot i could trust u. thot we were bros. homies. ride together die together

 **asshole:** live fast die young bad girls do it well

 **asshole:** uncle i’m dead serious i need that credit card to LIVE

 **asshole:** haha. DEAD serious. get it. ur dead

 **asshole:** seriously tho i need that money

Nico has never been this close to homicidal in his life. And he fought a _war_.

It’s raining a little as he stomps his way downtown, the exact opposite direction from the apartment, probably looking a little too murderous for a casual daytime stroll. There’s a ripple in the air to his left, but the last fucking thing he needs is to deal with the Reaper on top of the hissy fit being thrown in his cell phone at the moment, so he just shoots the emptiness a dirty look until the Reaper gets the message and the ripple disappears.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought,” he mutters, a little viciously, and then he yanks his hood up over his head and keeps walking.

The sky is the color of steel, the city stained black and white and sepia, and it’s days like this that the ache in Nico’s stomach bothers him the least. No sign of the sun, no hint of the color blue. Days without a noon.

The sword might as well be an accessory, on days like this. Like a super unfashionable watch or something.

 _Excuse me, all my astral swords are Gucci,_ his head supplies in a familiar voice, sharp with an even more familiar amusement, and Nico has to remind himself that he’s _annoyed_ at that idiot, Goddamn it, stop laughing to yourself, you asshole.

He’s still smiling to himself a little bit despite his best efforts, hands stuffed in the pockets of his black skinny jeans and shoulders of his hoodie dampened by the rain, when his life changes forever.

He happens to look up, and meet the gaze of a boy with eyes the brightest blue he’d ever seen.

For a long, long moment, the world goes still.

The boy is tall and tan and freckled, with curls the color of sunlight and flecks of gold inside his eyes. He is a riot of color in a world of black and white, burning neon against the black-white-sepia of the city. He’s got a bookbag slung over his shoulder, a paint-splattered sweatshirt for the local university with sleeves long enough to obscure his hands, the shadow of a dimple in his cheek. And his eyes widen, for a fraction of a second, when they meet Nico’s, before his gaze returns back to the ground sharply, almost like he’s afraid.

His eyes meet Nico’s.

His eyes _should not_ meet Nico’s.

Mortals cannot _see_ Nico, not unless he wants them to.

In Nico’s ear, for the first time in millennia, a voice whispers, _Bride_.

* * *

 

 

Nico slams into the apartment, dripping wet from the rain and panting, bracing himself on the doorframe to try and regain his breath.

“What the fuck, dude, did you run here?” a voice laughs, above his head, and Nico wheezes an extremely angry wheeze.

“Oh,” Leo Valdez says, propping his hands on his hips. “Fuck. _Why_?”

“Exercise,” Nico says, poisonous, glaring daggers at Leo, who’s got some kind of pastel blue-green clay-like substance on his face and a cucumber slice in each hand. “What the hell’s on your face?”

“A mud mask, it’s good for pores.” Leo lifts an eyebrow and then shoves one of the cucumber slices in his mouth. “When’s the last time you ran anywhere, old man? The French Revolution?”

“I run places,” Nico huffs.

“Yeah, around corners to avoid human contact.” The other cucumber slice disappears into Leo’s mouth. “Is that what happened? Was there a friendly old lady walking behind you and you sprinted back here to avoid her or something?”

“ _No_ ,” Nico says, in a tone of extreme bereavement.

"O _h_ ,” Leo croons. “Was it a guy?”

Nico curls his lip and kicks his shoes off. “Fuck you, Valdez.” And then he pauses and mutters, “I need a beer.”

“Stop drinking to avoid your problems.”

“Stop buying us alcohol, then.”

Leo follows Nico into the kitchen. “Now that you _mention_ it,” he says, in the tone of someone who’s been very much _waiting for Nico to mention it_ , “my credit card-”

Nico opens the fridge and digs around. There’s a bunch of Capri Sun pouches and what looks like a tube of GoGurt, but no beer. “So when you say ‘stop drinking to avoid my problems-’”

“Do as I say, not as I do, uncle. My card?”

“That’s not my call and you know it,” Nico says, grabbing a Capri Sun and stabbing the straw into it with maybe a little too much gusto. “Sammy thinks you’re irresponsible with money. And, for the record, I’m inclined to agree.”

“I have _you_ though,” Leo whines, “and you can just… I don’t know, poof more money into existence whenever you want!”

“That’s bad for inflation,” Nico says around the Capri Sun straw in his mouth.

“You’re a butt,” Leo announces decisively. “Also, you seriously do look like hell, uncle. What happened?”

Nico pauses. The juice tastes over-sweet in his mouth. In his mind, the blond boy on the street looks up, meets his eyes, and looks down again, something nervous and jittery in the slope of his shoulders.

“Just… I thought about something today that I hadn’t in a long time.”

“What? Actually having a sex life? It totally _was_ a dude you met, wasn’t it?”

Nico launches his empty juice pouch at Leo’s face. Leo’s not quick enough to dodge it.

* * *

 

It hangs over his head the next few days in a way he’d promised himself it wouldn’t.

There is no such thing as fate, and Nico has learned long before now that the deity is far from merciful, especially to men like him. Getting his hopes up just because he felt some butterflies in his stomach when he looked at a handsome man would be beyond stupid. It would be stupider than stupid, in fact, and Nico was not in the business of breaking his own heart when other people could so aptly do it for him.

“Are you sure you’re okay, uncle? You’ve been really acting kind of weird the past couple days.”

Nico gives a small grunt of affirmation from where he’s lying face-down on the floor. Over on the couch, Leo pauses the episode of _Project Runway_ they were watching - a vintage one, from the third season - to grab a handful of popcorn out of the bowl on the coffee table.

“Nico. What’s the deal? I thought we figured out a long time ago that when you’re having a low it helps to talk about it-”

“I’m not,” Nico sniffs, “having a low. I am simply contemplating my place in the universe.”

“That sounds like a low to me.”

“Well, that’s because you’re a pleb.”

Leo gives a little gasp. “I am _not_ a pleb, you take that back right now.”

Nico turns over just enough to stick his tongue out in Leo’s general direction. Leo throws a pillow at him.

(Inside his mind, the boy with blond hair smiles at him.)

“What if we launched me into space?” Nico asks, voice muffled by the floor. “Do you think that would work?”

Leo hums thoughtfully. “Not sure. Do you need to breathe?”

“I don’t think so,” Nico grumbles miserably. “I think I just like to.”

Leo huffs out a laugh and is silent for a second before he presses: “Are you really never gonna tell me what instigated this particular bout of existential depression?”

And Nico scowls, and opens his mouth, and he _is_ going to tell Leo - he really is. But then a voice bursts through the usual dull roar of sound inside his head, clear and ringing, in a way eerily similar to the way it had, just once, two decades before.

 _Please, a job. A rich boyfriend. A_ break _. Please, just give me a break_.

And Nico squeezes his eyes shut against the static and the noise, frustrated and exhausted, and when he opens them again, he’s not in the apartment anymore.

He’s on a pier.

He’s on a pier, holding a bouquet of ugly-looking flowers, staring at an extremely familiar-looking boy with big blue eyes and a startled expression and a whole birthday cake with still-smoking candles perched haphazardly on his lap.

The ocean rolls gently next to them. It _smells_ real, like brine and summer.

“Um,” the boy says. “Hi?”

Nico says, “What the fuck.”

They stare at each other for another second, the candles still smoking faintly, Nico feeling a major headache encroaching on his temples. Then the boy points at the flowers in Nico’s hands and says, a hint of a question in his voice, “Pretty?”

“No, they’re not,” Nico says, flatly. “Why did you call me here? _How_ did you call me here?”

“Me?” the boy says, pointing a finger at his chest and blinking. His eyelashes are kind of sandy blond. There are freckles on his cheeks and the bridge of his nose. Nico wants to kick himself. “I... didn’t call you here. You came on your own. Didn’t you?”

“I didn’t,” Nico says. He lifts an eyebrow at the cake on the boy’s lap.

“Oh,” the boy says, giving the cake a startled glance. “Um. It’s my birthday.”

“Well, happy birthday,” Nico says, and then he spins on his heel and gets ready to get the fuck out of there, because this boy’s gaze is starting to make his skin feel itchy, and there’s something huge and yawning opening up inside his chest cavity that’s getting extremely difficult to ignore.

“Wait!” the boy says, and then there’s a hand on Nico’s hand, and Nico’s eyes snap open. He whips around to face the boy just as the boy draws back, wincing, a hint of wispy blue flame trailing web-like between Nico’s skin and his.

“Hot,” the kid mutters, shaking his hand and wiggling his fingers like he’s expecting to have lost movement or something.

“Sorry,” Nico says, automatically, and the boy looks surprised, before a stuttering smile blooms bright across his face.

“It’s fine, it was my fault! I grabbed you.”

“True,” Nico says, evenly. And then he adds, a little more sharp, “ _W_ _hy_ did you grab me?”

“Well, you came to grant my wish, right?” The boy tosses his hands in the air. “You can’t just _leave_ before you do it. That would be absurd.”

“I did _not_ come to grant your wish,” Nico hisses. “I’m not a fairy godmother. Do I look like a fairy godmother?”

The boy blinks, looks him up and down slowly. Nico fights the urge to fidget.

“No,” the boy says, thoughtfully. “I guess you don’t. And you’re not a proper ghost, either, even though I figured you had to be at first. What are you?”

Not a _proper_ ghost?

Could this kid see spirits?

“What are _you_?” Nico demands.

“My name’s Will Solace,” the boy says, and he sets the cake aside and scrambles to his feet clumsily, sticking out a hand for Nico to shake. “Nice to meet you.”

“Huh,” Nico says. He squints at Will’s hand for a second before Will reaches out and snags his, shaking it quickly and dropping it before the heat from Nico’s fire gets to be too much. Will’s hands are long and tan, with what looks like a shopping list scrawled in pen across the back of the left and what looks like a doodle of a UFO on the inside of his right wrist.

“Those flowers don’t suit you,” Will says, cheerfully. “You could give them to me, even if you’re not a wish-granter. It’s my birthday, after all.”

Nico blinks, and Will must take this as acquiescence, because he gently takes the bouquet out of Nico’s hands. “What does buckwheat signify, do you know?” he asks, lowering his face down to the blossoms.

“Lover,” Nico answers, automatic. And then Will’s lifting his head and looking at him, and they’re looking at each _other_ , and there’s something violent and electric thrumming in Nico’s veins. Burning in his chest.

“Nico,” he hears himself say. “My name. Is Nico.”

“Nico,” Will repeats, and his name in Will’s mouth sounds the same as the way Nico had said the word _lover_.

Nico feels like his veins are on fire.

“Your wishes.” Nico’s on autopilot now, letting the strange bubbling effervescence in his chest take over. “A job, a rich boyfriend, a break. The chicken restaurant down the street from your university will hire you. The boss is a little odd. Ask her about architecture. Your aunt and cousins are going out of town on a sudden trip, so you won’t see them for awhile. The… the bruises she’s already given you will fade a little more quickly than normal, if that helps. I can’t do anything about the rich boyfriend. Check a fancy bar or something, maybe you’ll get lucky.”

Will blinks, and then a smile spreads slowly across his face, bright and sweet and deliberate.

“Thank you,” he says. “Nico.”

“Yeah,” Nico rasps, and then he turns and lets himself dissolve, hears Will’s soft gasp behind him, tries not to think about what that gasp would taste like against his mouth.

“What the fuck?” Leo says, when Nico re-materializes in their living room. “Did you at least bring takeout or something?”

Nico sneezes, the smell of the ocean still heavy on his tongue.

And that should be the end of it.

It should, it should.

But it is not.


	3. Chapter 3

**2005**

William Solace was born cursed.

Or, at least, that’s what he figures. It’s sort of the only answer that makes sense. He must’ve done something really, really nasty in a previous life, because nothing - _nothing_ \- in this one comes easy.

He notices the ghosts for the first time when he is very young, barely old enough to remember. The memory is vague inside his mind. Heavy, like fog. He is at the beach with his mom, and a kitten winds around his legs. He coos at her, scratches her chin, and looks up proudly to see his mom’s face as pale and drawn as it’s ever been.

It scares him. He steps away from the kitten.

“I’m so sorry, Will,” his mom tells him, scooping him into her arms and cradling his head against her shoulder. “I hoped this wouldn’t happen.”

“I don’t understand,” Will tells her, very matter-of-factly.

It’s hard to remember, but he thinks after that she cried.

That night, they eat dessert before dinner and watch cartoons in their pajamas. When Will’s mom is putting him to bed, she tucks him in extra tight and kisses his nose. She tells him not to look the ghosts in the eye, that if he refuses to acknowledge them, they’ll leave him be. She says they just want to talk to someone, that they’re lonely, that they’re scared.

“Just be careful and you’ll be fine,” she promises, and Will beams up at her, because his mother is his world, and when she tells him something, he believes her.

He doesn’t look the spirits in the eyes, after that.

They still find him, though.

They always, always find him.

When he’s five, he breaks off from his mom while they’re walking and follows a puppy no one else can see into an abandoned alleyway. When he’s six and entering school, there’s a little girl on the playground everyone calls his imaginary friend, who follows him around and sometimes looks strangely bloody, in an abstract way Will can’t explain. When he’s eight and a half, an old lady on the bus clasps his hand and then disappears in front of him. There’s one woman, with a pretty face and ancient eyes and a feather braided into her hair, who sits on the corner of the street and sells lettuce, and disappears when you try to look back at her once you’ve passed.

Sometimes the ghosts are kind. Sometimes they’re terrifying, covered in blood or twisted into horrifying angles or missing whole chunks of themselves. Sometimes they want to touch him, breathe down his neck, hear him respond to their calls of ‘bride.’

Bride.

(That’s the nature of Will’s curse. The core of it. He just doesn’t understand what it _means_.)

Will is terrified.

The curse is manageable, with his mom’s help. Sometimes he gets the feeling she sees them too, that she’s just like he is - maybe even worse. But she never talks about it, and Will doesn’t bring it up.

It is manageable, until the day of his ninth birthday, when he gets home from school and something is wrong.

At first, he can’t put his finger on what it is, exactly. He walks in and his mother beams at him and ushers him to the table, where a cake is sitting, candles already lit and strategically positioned into a simple, smiling face. Will’s name is written on the cake in icing, and when Will’s mom tells him to make a wish, her voice shakes.

Why?

Will looks up.

A tear makes its way down his mom’s face.

Will’s hands close into fists around the hem of his shirt.

“How?” he whispers. He’s crying now, too, and the ghost of his mother shakes her head.

“A car accident on the way home from work,” she says, making a valiant effort to smile through her tears. “I’m sorry, baby. It’s your birthday. I’m so sorry.”

“Mom,” Will says, voice wet and wobbly. His chest feels empty, the taste in his mouth bitter, bitter, bitter. Like blood.

“I was past my time, baby,” his mother’s ghost says. “Living on borrowed time. Don’t worry, sweetheart. I’ll be fine. But I need you to listen to me carefully, all right? I’m being collected by an ambulance right now. When the hospital calls, I need you to answer. They’re going to call your aunt to come collect your things and take care of you, but for now, answer the phone and then go to the hospital, okay?”

Will nods. His throat is burning. The smell of the candles burning in front of him makes his mouth taste like ashes.

Ashes, ashes.

His _mom_.

“Once you’ve left, don’t come back here,” his mom instructs him, low and fierce, using her serious voice. “Do you understand me, Will? If you stay, he’ll find you. He’ll take you, too.”

Over at the desk, the phone rings.

His mother says, “I love you.”

Will manages, “I love you too,” and then she reaches towards his face and smiles, so so kind and so so familiar, and disappears.

He follows his mother’s instructions as best he can, answering the phone despite the sobs racking through him and then stumbling out into the garden, his school uniform still on, shoelaces half untied. Night is falling. Will’s breath rises up in front of him like a cloud, and he hugs his arms around him and takes a step.

Another.

Another.

The air is heavy, heavy. Still.

Will can’t breathe.

On the other side of the garden, the darkness twists. Curls. Changes. Solidifies until it becomes something that it was not.

Through the gate steps a man in a black with a clipboard in his hands and a hat pulled low over his eyes.

 _He’ll find you_ , Will’s mother’s voice says, inside his head. _He’ll take you_. Panic bursts into life in Will’s chest and he snaps his gaze to the ground, vision still blurred by tears. He reaches up, fumbling around his neck, and says, in a voice too loud and too high, “Oh, no, I forgot my scarf.” But when he turns around to retreat, take refuge in the house, maybe call for help, the man is in front of him. Closer this time.

Will squeezes his eyes shut.

“I know you can see me,” the man says. “Missing soul.”

Will chokes.

“I can’t,” he whispers, a mantra, over and over and over again. “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t-”

“You can,” the man says, and he sounds almost apologetic. “Will Solace. Age zero. Cause of death, hit and run.”

“No,” Will says.

“No,” a voice echoes, behind him.

Will’s shoulders crumple in and he turns to see the vegetable lady from the corner stride forward, calm and steady-eyed, stepping between the man in black and Will. There’s a cabbage in her hands, a smudge of dirt on her cheek. The man in black looks alarmed, taking a step back.

“I brought a birthday gift, but it looks like I was almost late to the party,” she says. And then she turns to Will and says, gently, “Go now, kiddo. And never come back to this place. He won’t be able to find you as long as you don’t return.”

The man in black lifts his chin, peering at Will from beneath the brim of his hat. Will stands there, fists clenched, hands trembling.

The vegetable lady presses the cabbage into his hands and cups his cheek in her palm, just for a moment.

“Go,” she says, those ancient eyes burning on his.

Will goes.

He goes to the hospital. He goes to his aunt’s house, where he dodges punches and dishes flung at his head and ugly words dripping with vitriol. He goes to school and stares at the floor, at his textbooks, at the wall, figuring that making no eye contact at all is better than the alternative. He darts down side streets to avoid spirits. He wakes in the middle of the night with his mom’s face burning in his eyes and the word ‘bride’ molten hot in his mouth.

William Solace was born cursed.

He is beginning to hate the word ‘bride.’

* * *

 

**2017**

Will doesn’t believe in prophecies, but he applies to work at the chicken restaurant down the street from his university anyway.

It’s a bit of an internal battle that he fights as he walks straight there after his last class of the day. There’s no such thing as benevolent wish-granters dropping from the sky, and it’s obvious that some handsome dude on a pier can’t just… just wave a magic wand or whatever and solve all of Will’s problems. Will knows that. But when he got home the evening of his birthday and his aunt announced, immediately, that she’d planned a trip for herself and Will’s cousins and that they’d be gone for a week at the least…

Well. Will might just be willing to set logic aside for now.

(And, to be quite honest, his life’s never been particularly logical anyway.)

So he walks into the chicken place, hands fiddling with the straps of his backpack nervously, peering around at the counter, the menu, the coolers full of drinks. It’s small inside, cozy, a nice mix of modern and clean while still being inviting. It’s off hours so the place is empty except for a woman with Disney princess hair - blonde, wavy, long, flawless - sitting hunched at a table near the counter, nose buried in a book that looks heavy enough to bludgeon someone to death with, eating french fries out of a basket. She looks up as Will steps closer, lifts an eyebrow at his obvious nervousness.

“Hello,” she says, like a question.

“Hi,” Will says, his voice cracking a little. God. How embarrassing. “I’m… um. Looking for the owner?”

“You found her,” the Disney princess says. Her makeup is perfect, too. Understated but exceptional. Eyeliner sharp enough to kill a man. “What can I help you with?”

“ _You’re_ the owner?” Will gasps before he can help himself, and the woman looks unimpressed.

“Yes. My name’s Annabeth Chase. And you are…?”

“Oh. I. Yes. Sorry. My name’s Will and I… You just - were reading, and you’re very young-looking, and I assumed you were a student, I’m very sorry-”

Annabeth’s expression softens just slightly. “You weren’t wrong. I am a student. I’m on track to get a PhD in architecture at the university. I also own this place, though.”

“Oh,” Will says. “Wow. Um. Why?”

Annabeth shrugs and pops another fry in her mouth. “I needed the money to pay my way through grad school, and this seemed like a good option to get the administrative experience. Plus I knew the previous owner and he gave me a good deal on the place. Did you need something from me?”

Will feels his ears beginning to turn scarlet. _Embarrassing_. “Oh, right. Yes. I saw that you were hiring. I wanted to submit my application. I’m very organized and an enthusiastic employee, and I can do all the work that you don’t want to do, and I can work pretty much whenever because of… um. Certain home situations, and I-”

Annabeth tilts her head, tucks a strand of hair behind her ear. “Hm. Any experience?”

“A little. I’ve been a waiter before.”

“This won’t be glamorous.”

“I know.”

“And the hours will sometimes suck.”

“That’s fine.”

“Plus our clientele is eight-nine percent university students. I’ve done the math. They don’t tip well.”

“That’s okay, too.”

Annabeth looks at him - her eyes are gray, that’s so _cool_ , Will wishes he had gray eyes - and Will gets the sudden and violent sense that she can see right through him, down to the core. There’s a moment of eye contact, and then Annabeth’s mouth curves into a tiny smile and she says, “All right, then. When can you start?”

* * *

 

Will walks home slowly that night after work, hands stuffed in the pockets of his bomber, head down. One of his hands is closed around a brand-spanking-new name tag with the words ‘Will Solace’ inscribed. It looks surprisingly professional. Sits nicely on Will’s chest, even when he’s mopping or doing the dishes or whatever.

He doesn’t believe in prophecy, or in wish-granters, or in handsome boys who materialize on piers to look at you with sad, heavy eyes, like they’ve seen everything in the world and then some. He doesn’t believe in any of that.

To be fair, though, most people don’t believe in ghosts, either.

Will lowers his head and keeps walking, headed back to the - blessedly empty - apartment he shares with his aunt and cousins. The brown-eyed boy from the pier keeps passing through his mind. Will wishes, vaguely, that he could thank him somehow. Send him a nice card or something. _Hey there, guy who may quite possibly be God or something. Thanks for the leg-up on the whole job thing. That was solid as hell. Want to grab coffee sometime?_

Okay. Maybe he’d leave the coffee bit out.

It’s unseasonably warm tonight, the air gentle and cool on Will’s cheek as he walks through the park. The sun sinks bright and brilliant over the horizon, behind the crooked teeth of high-rises.

He’s passing by a trashcan when he spots a cigarette smoking on the ground, obviously freshly discarded. It’s sparking, enough to catch the grass nearby on fire, and Will sprints closer and blows out the flame without thinking, before it can get any larger. He waits for a second to make sure it’s out completely, and then, content, he straightens and turns-

And runs straight into somebody’s chest.

He takes a step back.

Oh.

 _Oh_.

Not just _anybody’s_ chest.

“Oh,” Will says. “Oh, my God.”

The boy from the pier looks, frankly, alarmed. He’s wearing a suit this time, tie loose around his neck, jacket unbuttoned. His hair is tousled, effortlessly handsome, and Will is struck once again by his eyes. Brown, run through with strange, inexplicable fragments of gold. Like Annabeth, making eye contact with him feels strikingly like he’s staring into Will’s soul.

“What the fuck is happening to me?” Nico demands, horrified.

“Hello to you too,” Will says, put out.

Nico points directly at Will’s face, squinting viciously. “What the _fuck_ is _happening_ to me? How can you do that?”

“Do what?” Will says, blank.

“Summon me.”

“I didn’t.”

“You did!” Nico throws his hands into the air, increasingly frustrated. There’s a little wrinkle on the bridge of his nose. Will fights back a (deadly) impulse to poke his nose and call him cute. “You so did! Nobody’s ever been able to do this! Ever! What the fuck is happening!”

Will blinks. Thinks about it. “Maybe you really _are_ my guardian angel?”

Nico makes a little whimpering sound and buries his face in his hands. “I’m really going crazy,” he mutters.

Will says, “Sorry?” because he isn’t quite sure how else to approach this situation and Nico looks so dejected it’s starting to worry him.

“Sorry,” Nico growls into his hands. “Sorry, he says.” He looks up, glaring at Will in a way that makes Will sort of want to take a few steps back. “Listen, whatever you’re doing here, it needs to stop. I’m busy. I was in a _meeting_.”

“Are you a businessman?” Will asks innocently.

“What? No, I-” Nico pauses. His nose wrinkles more. “It doesn’t matter.”

“No, no, it totally does,” Will presses. “Are you rich? Is that how you got me the job and sent my family out of town? Wait, hang on. Are you _alive_? How were you in a _meeting_? Are you a ghost CEO or something?”

“I am not,” Nico says, looking affronted, “a ghost CEO. And I am alive, thank you very much.”

“Really?” Will asks, interested.

Nico’s face falls a little bit. It makes him look younger. Will instantly wants to apologize. “Well,” he mumbles. “Sort of.”

There’s an awkward silence, Nico looking more and more miffed by the second, before Will blurts, “Thank you!”

Nico’s eyebrows crease. “For what?”

“For the job. And for the… thing. With my aunt and my cousins. I don’t know what you did, and frankly it’s a little bit creepy, but they say not to look a gift horse in the mouth and I certainly am not one to-”

“You talk a lot,” Nico interrupts, but he doesn’t say it harshly, more like he’s commenting on a marvel, something strange and wonderful he doesn’t understand. Will’s stomach feels kind of fluttery.

“I. Yes. Sometimes. When I’m nervous.”

Nico tilts his head. The gesture tugs at something in Will’s subconscious that he can’t quite put a name to.

“Why are you nervous?” Nico asks.

“You make me nervous,” Will says. And then he adds, “You didn’t bring me flowers this time.”

Nico’s eyes narrow and he looks up, towards the sky. Will thinks his cheeks look a little pink. “No. Sorry, I didn’t exactly have time to prepare.”

“Next time, then,” Will says, before he can talk himself out of it.

Nico goes still, and then something complicated crosses his face that Will can’t discern. Something like sadness, or mourning, or fear.

“Next time,” he repeats. And then he reaches up, runs a hand tiredly down his face. “Goodnight, Will Solace.”

And then he is gone, leaving Will standing alone on the sidewalk. He is about to leave when he notices a single daisy blooming in the place where Nico had just been standing.

He picks it. Tucks it behind his ear.

Over his head, a cherry tree blooms.


	4. Chapter 4

This world is built from threads, interwoven.

A soldier of the people - a general - a god. He lives in silence, hidden kisses and stolen touches and swordstrikes dodged by the length of a breath. He dies in silence, too. Staring into the eyes of his lover, who tells the emperor to _make it quick_.

(The night before Nico died, on his way back into the capital city from the war-torn villages of the north, he visited his sister’s grave and felt a change in the air.)

In the ashes of a once-great empire, a boy with eyes the color of the sea is born and dies. They take his memories, take his name, break him down and build him up again. They give him a list and a wide-brimmed hat the color of shadow. They call him Death, and they tell him good luck.

(Percy Jackson walks in darkness, and Nico di Angelo’s name will never appear on his list.)

A woman lays broken on the pavement, her blood burning bright. Improbable, in a sepia world. She is carrying a baby boy destined for _something_ , and she feels the earth shift as she seals his fate by reaching for the hand of a man who cannot die.

(When she is gone, and the parking lot is quiet, the three threads tangle and twist and separate. Words are exchanged. A threat. A warning.

_You and I both know the universe doesn’t take lightly to people meddling in the balance of life and death._

Over the heads of two shadows, a cherry blossom tree blooms. Its petals scatter before it dies.)

A boy built from sunlight with a mark like darkness on the back of his neck falls asleep on top of a textbook. There are bruises on his ribs, on his knuckles, on his veins. Highlighter smudged on his cheek. Loss smudged across his mind.

A name on his lips that is not his own.

(In the home of an aunt who hates him, a scarf that he likes to pretend still smells like his mother wrapped tight around his neck, Will Solace dreams.)

* * *

 

**2017**

Next time, he said. Next time. Goodnight, Will Solace. _Next time_.

With one hand on his phone, scrolling through results for the Google search _causes of irregular heartbeat_ , Nico slams into the apartment and announces, “I’m moving back to Seoul.”

In the living room, Leo is lying backwards on the couch, with his legs slung up over the back and his head dangling over the edge. He doesn’t look up from his Nintendo. “Yeah, alright. Can I rent the spare room out, then?”

“Yeah, whatever. Bye forever.”

On his way into the apartment, Nico trips over his own shoe and kicks at it viciously. It bounces off the wall and hits him in the shin.

* * *

 

It’s... difficult. For Nico to put a name to the emotion bubbling in his stomach.

It’s a little bit like panic, if panic tasted less like blood and more like something sweeter and sharper and infinitely more dangerous. The sword in his stomach feels worse than usual, too - _realer_ , heavy and hot and insistent. More corporeal.

Will Solace, with his sun-spun hair and his overlarge army-green bomber jacket and his disarming way of looking like everything good in the world rolled up into one. Nico blinks and he sees him. His chest is aching and he doesn’t know why.

He’s halfway done packing a suitcase before he stops to take a breath.

“Okay,” he mutters, drumming his hands on his bag nervously. “Okay. It’s fine. I’m okay.”

Okay.

So, yeah. There’s a new variable in the equation. It’s fine. Nico’s been alive for a very long time. He can handle a curveball or two, even one in the shape of a strange blond boy who can somehow magically summon him at will.

( _Ha_ , Leo’s voice says inside his head. _At Will. Get it?_ )

Nico launches a pair of boxers into his suitcase with a little too much venom.

He’s trying to calm down, trying to process. He’s always been impulsive, quick to feel and quick to act, but this is too big to just react to - Nico feels like he needs to _understand_.

What does this mean for him? If Will Solace can summon him, can other people do it, too? And what _triggers_ it? Nico was dead serious when he told Will he wasn’t a wish-granter, because he never has been. A patron, sometimes. A guardian, others. But if the divinity’s somehow changed the game...

Tentatively, Nico closes his fingers around the hilt of his sword and gives it a tug. It doesn’t give, but the burn seems sharper and more immediate this time. Less like a distant ache and more like a pressing need.

Altered.

That’s the most important aspect of this whole thing, Nico thinks. The most important aspect, and the aspect he understands the least. _Why_ would the rules suddenly change? And why _now_?

There’s movement outside his room, the sound of Leo rolling off the couch, the sound of the door opening and shutting, and then Leo calls Nico’s name. Nico blinks bleary-eyed around at the mess he’s made of his room before sighing heavily and slamming his suitcase shut, getting to his feet stiffly, one foot at a time, and dusting imaginary dust off his suit.

Outside, Leo’s helping an extremely elderly man with a strikingly curly shock of white, white hair into a seat at the dinner table. “Grandpa,” Leo’s saying, in a tone of supreme reasonableness. “You can’t come all the way here and _still_ refuse to talk about my credit card, that’s just not fair. There must be something in the Constitution that prevents this.”

“Ah, Nico,” Sammy says, in his still-heavy accent, squeezing his grandson’s face between his palms. “What am I to do with this boy? He thinks he knows better than his elders.”

“Occupational hazard,” Leo manages through Sammy’s grip on his cheeks, jabbing a thumb in Nico’s direction.

“Hilarious,” Nico deadpans. “Sammy, I’m really glad you’re here. I actually need to talk to you.”

“Yes, I know.” Sammy releases Leo’s face and shoots Nico a crooked smile, strikingly similar to Leo’s. There’s a flash, in Nico’s mind, of Leo’s face sometime in the far-distant future, but Nico smothers the image down as he sinks down to sit at Sammy’s side.

“You know?” Nico echoes, a bit teasingly.

“Call it an old man’s intuition. I could feel you thinking from miles away. You’ve always thought so _loudly_.”

“Occupational hazard,” Nico says, leveling a half-glare in Leo’s direction. Leo scowls and squirms free of his grandpa, swinging around the table to sit down on the other side.

“Why don’t you tell me what happened?” Sammy says, patting Nico’s hand fondly.

By the time Nico’s done talking, Sammy’s smile has narrowed and faded into a thoughtful frown. Leo’s sobered as well, sitting with his head propped up on one hand and his eyebrows creased, fingers tracing letters and symbols onto the wood of the table that only he can see.

“So when you disappeared earlier...” Leo begins, slowly.

“I showed up right next to that kid again,” Nico affirms, picking at a loose thread on his tie. “I don’t know why. The more I think about it, the less it makes sense.”

“And that’s why you came in screaming about moving your ass back to Korea, as well?” Leo asks, and when Nico nods, he sighs and drops his head on the table. “Dude! I really thought you were mad at me! I thought it was something I said!”

Nico winces. “Ah. Sorry.”

Sammy drums his knobby fingers on the table and hums lowly. “Have you considered perhaps his voice just spoke in your head particularly loudly and you were drawn to him because of that? This has happened before. Many times.”

“It was different this time. I didn’t have any choice. Just… one second I was here, and the next, I was gone.”

There’s a silence for a moment, Sammy looking at Nico with inscrutable eyes, Leo’s fingers moving slightly, scratching something out in midair.

“Maybe,” Leo says, suddenly, “he’s your bride.”

Nico freezes.

 _Your bride_.

_A little too late for luck, now._

(In Nico’s memory, Esperanza Valdez takes his hand and says, “Don’t give up, _mijito._ You have waited a long time. Perhaps long enough.")

Nico hears himself say, as if from a distance, “No.”

“Come on, uncle. Don’t tell me you haven’t considered this.” There must be _something_ on Nico’s face, something cold and hard and maybe a bit frightened, because Leo lifts his hands in surrender and says, “All right, all right. I know, Nico. I just think it’s a possibility worth considering.”

There’s something knocking on Nico’s mind.

Something, something.

A car crash. Blood on pavement, blood on snow. And Death, standing in a parking lot.

 _All you’ve done is buy her time_.

“Okay,” Nico says. “Noted. Now, if you two gentlemen will excuse me, I’ve got a suitcase to pack.”

Sammy frowns at him. “Hey, now. Don’t tell me you’re thinking of moving my grandson out to who-knows-where. He’s got a company to take over. I don’t have that many years left, you know. I expect you two to stay in the city until you’re both rich enough to retire.”

“You’re rich enough to retire _now_ ,” Leo points out, and Sammy swats good-naturedly at his head.

Nico sighs and forced his expression to lighten, placing a hand on Sammy’s shoulder. “Thanks for coming, Sammy. I’ll let you know my plans. And, of course, my offer that Leo stay behind when I leave is always on the table.”

“I must confess, I don’t know how our ancestors would feel about that.” Sammy leans back in his chair and sighs as his bones creak audibly in response. “I know you don’t want to hear this, _mijito_ , but you’re going to have to face this boy eventually. He carries a secret in him. One way or another, you will have to know.”

Nico nods.

“I know,” he says, bone tired all of a sudden. “I know.”

* * *

 

Nico likes to think that he’s mellowed out a little in his advanced age. Learned from mistakes, grown with time, picked up a trick or two after years of feeling everything, always, with one hundred percent of his self.

And _that_ is why he doesn’t book his flight to the other side of the world right away, but instead reasons that it can at least wait until ticket prices fall a bit. Seoul’s very nice this time of year, after all. Flights are competitive, and Nico hates flying coach.

And then he thinks about Will’s face again, and the way his stomach swoops when their eyes meet, and he finds himself scrolling through www-dot-Expedia-dot-com before even noticing he’d turned on his laptop.

“What’s the dude’s name?” Leo asks him, a few days into him packing and unpacking and repacking his suitcase. “For scientific purposes only.”

Nico answers, “Will Solace,” in a moment of fragility and immediately wants to kick his own ass.

“Oh,” Leo says, already looking at his Facebook profile. “He’s pretty hot. And he goes to my university.”

Scratch that. Nico wants to kick his own ass _twice_.

To keep himself busy, he goes through the motions - normal things, mundane things. He goes to his job as a nameless board member at Sammy’s company. He plays Pokemon on Leo’s DS when Leo is out of the apartment and dodges furiously thrown projectiles when Leo gets back. He packs and he unpacks and he repacks. And if he looks for Will Solace - just a little, just at his Instagram profile and the website of the university he’s attending and maybe at a couple old Twitter posts - well, that’s his own goddamn business, isn’t it?

Know thy enemy, and all that.

Or something.

It is five days before he is summoned to Will’s side again. It barely even feels like a surprise this time. He is in pajamas, gray flannel pants and an old, soft black t-shirt, fuzzy socks on his feet in place of slippers. One second he’s in his bedroom, reaching for the Lush facial mask Leo bought him. The next, he’s standing in a small, simple, unfamiliar kitchen, staring down a very, very familiar boy holding a still-smoking match, lips pursed like he’d just blown it out.

“God,” Nico says.

“Hi,” Will Solace says, eyes round and bright. And then his face splits slowly into a smile until he’s beaming, brighter than a supernova and twice as dangerous.

“ _Ah_ , I _knew_ it,” he says, doing a little wiggling dance, and when Nico just stares, he brandishes the candle at him a bit and explains, smugly, “The two times I summoned you before, I was blowing a fire out. I decided to test the connection.”

Nico attempts valiantly to run through his options. He’d come up with a worst-case-scenario plan for exactly this situation, but now he’s here, and Will is looking almost achingly soft, with a maroon sweatshirt and torn, pale jeans and strange, fluorescent socks printed with galactic-printed cats. He’s wearing delicately-rimmed, overlarge, round glasses sitting a little low on his nose. Crooked, like he’d been rubbing his eyes and forgotten they were there.

_Red alert. Red alert._

_Get yourself_ together _, Nico._

“Oh,” Nico says, like the intellectual he is. “So what do you want, then?”

Will blinks and scrubs a hand through his hair. His gaze shifts from Nico to down at his feet, sheepish pink spreading to the tips of his ears. “I… actually hadn’t thought that far ahead, to be honest. I wasn’t entirely confident this would work.”

“I see.” Nico frowns, crosses his arms over his chest. Tries not to think too hard about how his hair is probably standing up in the back from lying the couch right after he took a shower. “Well, then. Bye.”

And he closes his eyes and wills himself to vanish, disappearing in a puff of smoke. His room is just as he left it, the Lush facial mask still open on his nightstand. Nico clasps a hand on his chest.

“What did I do to deserve this,” he mutters, fiercely, towards the sky.

And then the world shudders and disappears, and he’s back in Will’s kitchen.

“Sorry!” Will says, holding another smoking match, eyes wide. “I panicked.”

“Fair enough,” Nico says. “Bye again.”

“No, wait!” Will blurts, and he really looks… good today. Sleepy eyes. Tousled hair. Nico wants to die, a bit. “Nico please. You know we need to talk about this. Neither of us know what’s happening-”

“Correct. Goodbye.”

His bedroom, just for a fraction of a second. And then darkness, Will’s kitchen, and another smoking match.

Nico points at the match, accusingly. “I’m beginning to understand that this is an absolutely horrifying abuse of power.”

Will’s eyebrows are pushed together, mouth scrunched (distractingly) into an angry pout. “Tell me about it! Are you seriously telling me you don’t want to understand _why_ I can do this? You can’t keep avoiding it.”

Nico scrunches his nose up. “You’ll find that I am excellent at putting things off.”

Darkness. Bedroom. Darkness. Kitchen.

“You’ll run out of matches eventually,” Nico says.

Will looks livid. “Okay, you know what? Fine! We won’t talk about it! We won’t address any of our problems ever and we’ll just keep living in the dark and not understanding a thing. Sound good?”

“Great,” Nico sighs, and he presses his face into his hands. “Yeah. Fantastic.”

When he looks up again, the annoyance on Will’s face has been replaced by something gentler. More like sympathy, Nico thinks.

 _Fuck_ , Nico’s brain informs him, quite eloquently.

“Since you’re here,” Will says, all in a rush, a little too loudly. Like he was holding tight onto the words before letting them tumble out. “You might as well stay for dinner.”

Nico lifts his eyebrows.

“You looked about ready to deck me ten seconds ago,” he points out.

“And then you looked like you were about ready to cry, so now I’m going to feed you,” Will says, decisively, and he reaches forward and grabs Nico’s forearm, and Nico’s stomach drops out from under him. “That’s the Solace way. Do you like southern fried chicken? It’s my mom’s recipe. Except I bake the chicken instead of frying because fried food is America’s silent killer.”

“I. Um. Yes?”

“Great. Sit down.” Will ushers him over to the spindly table in the corner, sweeping a pile of newspapers and what looks like a child’s coloring book out of the way. “Also I think your eyes are very pretty and I need you to know that. Even if you are a demon sent from hell or something terrifying like that.”

Nico feels his face turn to fire.

He mumbles something unintelligible and is absolutely positive he hears Will laugh at him as he sits himself down at the dinner table. Will gets to work cooking, humming something tunelessly under his breath, every once in awhile glancing at Nico like he wants to say something but decides better. Nico tosses questions around in his head, half-formed questions that feel more like impressions. _Who are you, why can you summon me, why does your smile look like the color yellow, would you let me touch you again if I asked, would it be wrong if I did?_

He swallows them all down, and only when the chicken is in the oven and the smell of garlic and chicken is making the air feel effervescent and warm does he finally say, “Can I ask you something?”

Will nods from where he’s seated at the countertop, stockinged feet kicking back and forth. “Shoot.”

“A job. A boyfriend. A break,” Nico recites, clasping and unclasping his hands underneath the table. “Why?”

Will looks confused for a moment before understanding dawns on his face. “Oh. My wishes the first time I summoned you. Right?”

Nico nods silently.

“Right, well. My mom’s dead. Maybe you knew that. How much do you know about me?”

“Nothing,” Nico says, quickly. And then he thinks about Leo’s Facebook history and admits, “Almost nothing.”

“But you read my thoughts that day,” Will says, and his eyes are burning on Nico’s face. Face thoughtful. Like he’s trying to deconstruct Nico and reassemble him, take him apart piece by piece and look inside.

“No,” Nico answers. “Well, yes. Kind of. I hear… things. People. Inside my mind. All the time. People who want things, mostly. I just… happened to hear you the loudest.”

“Oh.” Will looks at him for another long moment before redirecting his stare to the oven. “Well. Mom’s dead. I live with my aunt and cousins, but frankly my aunt never wanted me and I’ve always known it. I’m paying my way through an undergrad program at the moment, but I’m staring down a decade of student debt even without med school. Hence the job. And the break, I guess, too.”

He reaches down, brushes his knuckles against a spot on his torso and winces. Catches Nico staring. Tries to turn it into a smile. “And both of those things would be much, much easier if I could just marry rich. Hence the boyfriend.”

“Oh,” Nico says. “Is that why you’re wine-and-dining me?”

Will snorts and some of the discomfort melts from his face. “Did you just make a _joke_ , Nico di Angelo?”

“Sort of. A halfway joke.”

“It was good,” Will says, looking pleased. “I don’t have any wine, though, if you really did want some. Maybe some chocolate milk, though.”

Nico pauses, then nods. “Okay. sure. Chocolate milk.”

And Will laughs at him, grabs him a glass, and makes a face that makes him snort into his chocolate milk. The chicken finishes cooking and Will serves it hot, with a side of buttery mashed potatoes that dissolve in Nico’s mouth. They eat quietly, Nico’s shoulders curved small, as something terrifying arranges itself inside his mind.

“Can I ask you something too?” Will asks, when they’re both finished, Nico carrying the plates to the sink.

Nico hesitates, then nods.

“You’re not a ghost. You’re alive but not alive. Magical?” Will says it like a question. When Nico makes a face he takes for affirmation, he repeats, “Magical. Powerful enough to get me a job and send my family out of town, or… or at least tell the future or something. You don’t need to tell me what you are, Nico, but can I guess?”

Nico nods again.

Will says, “Goblin.”

Nico breathes.

* * *

 

He gets back to the apartment late that night, materializing in the foyer instead of his bedroom so he can grab a snack before bed. There are voices in the kitchen, Leo and what sounds like a friend from school, so he preps himself to snag some Cheerios, head back to his bedroom, and play the role he’s long since perfected of elusive roommate.

And then he steps out of the foyer, shoes in hand, only to come face to face with Percy Jackson seated at his kitchen table, eating from a plate of dinosaur-shaped chicken nuggets.

“Um,” Percy says. “Nico?”

“ _What the fuck_ ,” Nico half-screeches, launching himself across the room to wrestle Leo onto a headlock and cover his eyes. Leo makes a loud noise of protest and bats ineffectual at his arms. “What are you _doing_ here? What the fuck-”

Percy lifts his hands, looking baffled. “Leo… _this_ is your roommate?”

“What the fuck!” Nico repeats, increasingly high-pitched.

Leo wriggles out of Nico’s grasp and plants a hand on Nico’s face to shove him away. “Calm down, dude, what’s your problem?”

“Don’t look at his eyes!”

“Don’t be rude, asshole. This is our new tenant. You said I could rent out your room, remember?”

Nico feels his jaw hit the floor.

The Grim Reaper blinks at Leo Valdez. “I didn’t know Nico was your roommate.”

“I’m seriously losing my fucking mind,” Nico says.


	5. Chapter 5

“You don’t need to tell me what you are, Nico, but can I guess?”

  


 

 

 

 

 

This is the way the world ends.

  


 

 

 

 

“Goblin,” Will says, and Nico drops his fork.

Will’s eyes are very serious behind his too-large glasses, a wrinkle between his eyebrows. The kitchen suddenly feels suffocating instead of homey, with nowhere to hide from the way Will’s looking at him - a little bit serious, a little bit sorry, a little bit of something else that Nico’s too afraid to name but that he recognizes from a thousand lifetimes ago.

Nico feels pinned, trapped. Terrified.

Elated?

Safe.

 _Soft_.

Why does he feel so deliriously _happy_?

There’s stars spinning inside his mind. They’re shaped like Will, Will, Will.

“How,” he finally manages, very softly, “did you know?”

Will’s eyes widen, his lips parting. “I didn’t,” he says, “know for sure. I just… thought. Maybe. It was a guess.”

“A _guess_?” Nico repeats, his voice cracking high. “What kind of person guesses _goblin_? Out of all things, _goblin_? Like, we really bypassed vampire and werewolf and went right to goblin?”

 _Don’t get your hopes up, don’t get your hopes up, don’t get your hopes up_ -

Will’s lips twist up a little bit and he lifts one shoulder in a lopsided shrug. “I’ve grown up around ghosts my whole life, Nico. You’re kind of famous around the undead, you know.”

Nico presses a hand over his eyes. “I don’t know if famous is the right word for it, William.”

Will snorts. “Notorious, then.” He pauses, still looking at Nico like he wants _something_ from him, like he wants and wants and wants. And then he adds, “The ghosts all say you can’t die. That the gods blessed you because you were their strongest warrior. Is that true? Because no offense, but you don’t really look like the gods’ strongest warrior. Maybe their best lawyer, or something. Or their best Armani model. I didn’t think warriors went around New York City in three-piece designer suits. I’m babbling again, aren’t I? I’m sorry. I’m nervous.”

Nico plants his hands on his knees, curls his fingers into the fabric of his pajama pants like that’ll somehow anchor him. When he finally manages to speak, his voice comes out dry. “Yes and no.”

Will tilts his head. “Yes and no?”

“I _am_ the gods’ strongest warrior. Or, I was, anyway. And I can’t die. But it wasn’t a blessing.”

“Oh.” Will’s face falls. Nico sees the way his hands twist inside the cuffs of his sweatshirt.

“Yeah,” Nico whispers. His knuckles are white where he’s clasping his knees. He feels shaky, unsteady. On unsolid ground. Like the earth will open up and swallow him whole if he doesn’t stay silent. Stay careful.

“Nico,” Will says. He sounds off-balance, too, his voice brittle and unsure. “There’s something else the ghosts have told me, too.”

“Yeah?”

Nico doesn’t want to know. He doesn’t he doesn’t he doesn’t.

( _He already does_.)

All the centuries between then and now have not prepared him for this.

And then Will says, “I think it has to do with the sword in your chest,” and Nico’s on his feet, his chair crashing to the floor behind him. Will stares up at him, eyes round and alarmed behind his glasses, and Nico’s trying not to lash out, trying not to look terrified, trying not to be launched bodily back into history, into memory, into a moment where a boy with blueblueblue eyes stared down at him as he died and told his brother to _make it quick_. His heart’s slamming in his throat, the sword heavy and _burning_ in his stomach.

This is the realest it’s ever felt. The most solid, the most _dangerous_.

 _You could die_ , it whispers to him. _You could die. Today. Right now. If you wanted._

 _If_ Will Solace _wanted._

No immortality lasts forever.

“You can see it,” Nico says.

“Since the beginning.” Will nods and folds in on himself, shoulders sloping down and in. “And… Nico, I’m sorry, but there’s something else the ghosts said - about you, about the goblin, and _me_ -”

And Nico knows.

He knows.

The only one who can see the sword.

The only one who has the power to pull it out.

 _Lay my soul to rest_.

“They said that I’m-” Will begins.

“Please don’t,” Nico blurts. Will looks startled. Smaller than usual, young and faraway and vulnerable. “Please. Don’t.”

They look at each other, Nico’s hand drifting to rest at the place where the hilt of the sword protrudes from his stomach.

“I’m sorry,” Nico says. “Thank you for dinner,” Nico says. “I need to think,” Nico says.

 _I’m a goblin_ , Nico does not say _, and you were destined to be the reason I die._

Instead, he is selfish, and stupid, and he bumps his fingers against the back of Will’s hand, just once, before letting the darkness take him.

(When he gets home, there is a Grim Reaper in his apartment and an ache pounding in his head, his fingers itching with the memory of Will’s skin under his.)

* * *

 

Percy Jackson has been alive for a very, very long time.

Well, okay. Maybe not alive. After all, he’s figured out by now that things like life (and guilt, and recompense) are subjective.

  


Percy Jackson has been _something_ for a very, very long time.

  


He most certainly knows what he’s doing when he follows the butterfly to the table at the side of the road.

The butterfly is pure white, unblemished, the most perfect absence of color he’s ever seen. (He feels like he remembers that being wrong, scientifically speaking - something about white light being every color simultaneously, rather than none of them. There’s something resonant in that, probably, in what appears to be nothing actually being everything. Percy doesn’t know, really. He’s never been good with metaphor.)

Anyway, the point is, he knows exactly what it means when a butterfly the color of nothing-and-everything-all-at-once lands on his nose. Percy’s not an idiot, and he knows how to recognize his boss when he spots Them.

“I have a pickup in fifteen,” he tells the butterfly, helplessly, but it just alights on his outstretched hand for one wingbeat before lifting off again, in that strange, ungainly, lopsided way butterflies do.

“Fine,” he sighs. “You win.” And he shoves his hat down low over his head and takes off at a jog after it, dodging between people in the crowd so nobody’s thrown into a panic by being jostled by an invisible man. The butterfly stays in his line of sight even as he weaves away from the main road and into one of the smaller side streets, where several local vendors have set up tables.

The butterfly lands on the table of an unassuming woman with a feather threaded into her hair. Something about her tugs at Percy’s memory, and it takes him a second to place her. And then she looks up, lifts an eyebrow, and he’s struck by the sudden, violent memory of her stepping between him and a little blond boy with freckles on his nose and his name down to die. In the memory, she’s holding a cabbage. In the moment, right now, her table is covered in books and she’s wearing a fitted suit the color of a fire truck.

Percy ducks his head respectfully, hands at his sides as he lowers into a bow.

“It’s been awhile, Percy Jackson,” the woman says, a smile in her voice.

“Divinity,” he says, and the woman laughs.

“I go by Piper, here. Oh, quick, take off your hat.”

“Why?”

“Just trust me, Percy Jackson. I am your boss, after all.”

Percy straightens up and tugs his hat off his head, nose wrinkling in confusion, and Piper just winks at him before tapping one graceful finger on one of the books in front of her. It’s old - ancient, actually, its bound pages yellowing and held together improbably, crookedly, like its spine is liable to come apart beneath his hands. Something about it settles heavy in Percy’s stomach, something about the strange letters on the cover, about the unclean edges of the pages, about the twisted, gnarled spine.

It’s familiar, somehow. Percy doesn’t know why.

“Good luck,” she says, and Percy is reaching for the book when someone else grabs it first.

Percy goes still, freezing in place, a hand half-outstretched. The person who’d grabbed the book before him turns in his direction, starts to apologize, and then says, in a tone of great bewilderment, “Oh, God, are you _crying_?”

 _Is he_ crying _?_

Percy reaches up, startled, and brushes his fingertips across his cheeks. They come away wet, and there’s a funny, all-consuming sort of ache in his chest as he looks from the book to the girl holding it, who is gray-eyed and blond-haired and _beautiful_ , the kind of beautiful that topples kingdoms and musters armies and contains the potential to end the entire goddamn world, even in gray-blue flannel and torn skinny jeans and threadbare Yankees cap.

She’s staring at him like he’s insane, and he probably looks like he is, standing in an alleyway with his hand outstretched, crying because of a lost book. Is he even crying because of the book? He doesn’t know. He doesn’t know _why_ he’s sad at all. He just knows he is.

“I,” Percy begins, and the girl blinks at him, her expression a mixture of bafflement and concern.

“If it means that much to you, here,” she says, holding the book out towards him. “You can have it.”

Percy shakes his head and furiously scrubs away the last of the tears on his face. “No. No, it’s fine, I don’t need it, I don’t even _like_ to read.”

That appears to be the wrong thing to say, because the girl’s face closes off a little bit, some of the concern giving way to annoyance. “Then, why on earth-”

“Do we know each other?” Percy blurts, and the girl raises an eyebrow.

“No. Definitely not,” she says, and before Percy can gather up the comprehension to be hurt, she adds, “I’d remember.”

And Percy thinks, _I wouldn’t_ , because he doesn’t even know his own name anymore, not really, all he knows is what he’s been given - just enough to work, just enough to walk with death, just enough to subsist even when life has given way.

“I’m sorry,” Percy says, taking a halting step away. “I… seriously don’t know what’s wrong with me. The book’s yours. I-”

“Are you sure?” the girl asks, still squinting at him, and Percy says, emphatically, “ _Yes_.”

“O- _kay_ ,” the girl says, and her gray gaze moves from Percy to Piper, who smiles up at the both of them innocently while she takes the girl’s money.

“Would you like a bag?” she asks, and Percy is feeling almost lightheaded enough to laugh out loud at the image of the Divinity asking this gray-eyed, possibly-a-college-student whether or not she wants a bag. The gray-eyed girl just shakes her head though and tucks the book under her arm, shooting Percy a long look before turning to go.

Percy is rounding on Piper to demand what just happened when the gray-eyed girl turns around.

“You can have it when I’m done.”

Percy blinks. “What?”

“The book. When I’m done. You’re welcome to it.”

Percy’s opening his mouth to protest when the girl says, “So I better give you my number, then,” and Percy’s stomach swoops like he’d just fallen fifty feet.

He stands there while the girl scribbles her number onto a slip of paper Piper graciously provides, lets her press it into his hand, and then stares blankly at her back as she retreats from the table.

The number is written in tidy, no-nonsense script that’s just a little bit wobbly. Below it, the girl’s written her name.

“Anna…beth?” Percy reads, slowly.

And then he looks up, and the table beside him - along with the Divinity - is gone, replaced by a long stretch of wall, empty except for a simple, white-chalk drawing of a butterfly.

“Oh, come _on_ ,” Percy whispers furiously.

The brick wall does not respond.

“ _There_ you are,” a familiar (unwelcome) voice hisses, behind him, and Percy turns in time to see Jason Grace wrench the hat out of his hands and jam it messily back onto his head, so that the brim is drooping in front of his eyes. “I know you’re getting old, Percy, but you do remember it’s protocol to have the hat on at all times, right? Also, do you _realize_ Mrs. Amanda Michaels is due to die in less than a minute and a half? What were you doing?”

“Are you allowed to talk to your superior like this? Isn’t _that_ in the handbook somewhere?” Percy quips back, automatically, reaching up to adjust the hat so that he can see. He tosses another look between the empty wall and the place where the girl - Annabeth - disappeared into the crowd. Jason looks exasperated.

“You’re actually not technically ranked any higher than me, you know,” Jason reminds him, adjusting his own hat and flipping through the papers on his clipboard. “Fifty-five seconds, O Superior One.”

Percy pulls himself together, tries to reassemble the pieces of himself that seem to have scattered across the dirty pavement of this dirty alleyway.

“All right, all right. Let’s go, then.”

“This is our last pickup of the day,” Jason says, a smile flashing across his face below the brim of his hat. “Early dinner tonight?”

“Maybe if it’s on you,” Percy says. “I need to eat my weight in fake Chinese food.”

Jason looks sidelong at him. “What were you doing here, anyway?” he asks, as they make their way to the corner where Mrs. Amanda Michaels is fated to step out into traffic and die. Percy’s already going through the motions in his head; _TOD 4:15 pm, dead on impact_.

“I was meeting... someone,” Percy says, which is a bit true, at least. Percy doesn’t know what the Divinity _wanted_ , drawing him in so he could meet Annabeth, but it’s also not his place to know, he thinks.

Jason bumps his shoulder. “Someone special?” he croons.

Percy closes his eyes. In front of them, the traffic light turns green, the cars start flowing, and a woman in a long coat with undereye circles and her face buried in a manila folder nears the edge of the sidewalk.

“Something like that,” he says, and then he hears the impact.

* * *

 

When Nico gets home that night, he finds Leo online shopping on a website that looks suspiciously designer, Sammy quietly working through a pile of paperwork at the kitchen table, and the Grim Reaper sitting on his counter staring into empty space and drinking his way through all the alcohol in the house.

“Why,” Nico says, slowly, loosening his tie in the hopes that’ll help moderate the impulse to strangle himself with it, “are you still _here_ , Jackson?”

“I did pay for the room,” Percy points out, and God, he looks _miserable_ , staring at the can of Budweiser in his hand like it somehow contains the secrets of the universe or something. “Take it up with Leo.”

“Please don’t,” Leo calls from his place on the couch, and Nico shoots them both a sour look.

“I did pay for the house,” Nico snaps back, but Percy looks so pathetic he sort of has trouble injecting the usual amount of venom into the statement.

Percy blinks slowly. “I don’t,” he says, in a very small voice, and yep, yeah, he sounds just as miserable as he looks, this is _horrifying_ , “have anywhere to go.”

Nico makes a minute, defeated noise before stomping over to the counter and snatching a beer of his own, doing his best to glare as dangerously as possible, just to remind everyone here that he’s doing all of them a favor by not smiting them on the spot.

“He had a bad day, sir,” Sammy says, without looking up from his paperwork.

“I did,” Percy mumbles.

Nico fights back the urge to say, _yeah, well, me too, dickwad._

Instead, he says, “What the hell happened, then?”

Percy lifts an eyebrow and gives Nico a pointed gaze. “What happened to _you_ , Goblin?”

Nico pauses for a moment, thinks about Will’s eyes and Will’s smile and how _soft_ Will looked the night before and what the word _bride_ might sound like on Will’s pretty mouth. And then he lifts his beer and says, “Cheers, buddy,” and Percy laughs long enough and hard enough that Nico might start to, too.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi guys! I wanted to say real quick that I'm very, very sorry my update speed has been so slow for this fic. I actually hadn't finished watching the show the AU is based off of (I know???? I'm ridiculous) and I didn't want to continue writing until I'd seen every episode. But!! I finished watching/weeping openly over it the other day, and so hopefully I'll be able to work on it more earnestly!
> 
> (Btw if you're looking for something to binge-watch this summer and you haven't checked it out yet, Goblin is unbelievably beautiful and I definitely recommend watching it. And if you HAVE watched it please feel free to cry about it with me in the comments I'm.... a wreck.)
> 
> Finally, heads up that there are a couple vague mentions of Will being mistreated/abused in this chapter - nothing at all graphic, but if that kind of thing makes you uncomfy, be aware!

When Will dreams, he dreams of fire.

He dreams of flame on snow, crimson against white, the heat of a car as it speeds away. He dreams of the crash that took his mother, back when he was nine, of the way the car exploded and burned and burned until everything he cared about was ash.

He dreams of a quiet kind of flame, cupped between his palms, throbbing warm and steady, like a heart. He dreams of closing his eyes, breathing out slow, feeling the heat of a candle flicker into nothing.

He dreams of darkness. Blue fire licking at the hilt of a jet-black sword.

Dizzy, yellow-blue images, spinning around him. Tumbling. A dark-haired boy with a sword in his chest, kneeling on the stone steps of an enormous, looming palace, his head bowed low as blood seeps between his fingers. A man with a wide-brimmed black hat and sad, sad eyes, built from darkness. A woman in red, lifting her head and looking steadily,  _ purposefully _ , into Will’s eyes.

A butterfly, bright white, landing on his fingers just for a moment before fluttering away.

When the dreams fade, Will wakes up alone in a house he’s never belonged in, breath tearing through his chest and sheets tangled around his legs, reaching out automatically for someone beside him before he realizes that of course, of course, no one is there.

* * *

 

There’s a ghost sitting beside him in lecture today.

Sometimes it takes some processing for Will to figure out who is a ghost and who is not; he’s found, over the years, that the dead have a tendency to act remarkably  _ alive _ . That’s why he doesn’t really notice this girl right away - she’s just sitting there when Will walks in, quiet, head bowed as if in prayer. Will figures she’s tired or stressed or thinking. College students are usually some combination of the three.

It isn’t until the professor sends around the sign-in sheet and the boy sitting to the girl’s right passes it directly to Will, on her left, that Will thinks,  _ oh _ .

The girl winces a little bit as she watches the piece of paper slide deliberately past her. There’s something pained in her face, deep in her eyes, and Will watches her take out a notebook from her own bag and scrawl something down. Her name, he thinks, like she’s trying to remind herself of the truth of it. He sees the word  _ Selina _ .

Inside his head, his mother tells him,  _ They won’t bother with you as long as you don’t look in their eyes _ .

Will, his hand trembling ever-so-slightly, picks up his pen and scribbles the words,  _ Selina is a pretty name _ , very small, in the corner of his notebook.

The girl - the ghost - goes perfectly still before lifting her chin, slowly, to look at Will’s face. Will keeps his eyes studiously on the professor, but tips his mouth up in the slightest half-smile he can manage.

Selina takes a tiny, shuddering breath and says, her voice pretty and musical and  _ real _ , with the same cadence as a living, breathing person: “Thank you.”

Will gives her a minute nod, eyes still firmly fixed in front of him, and goes back to his notes. The girl is quiet through the rest of the lecture, but when Will gets up to leave at the end, she follows him.

Will lets her, even though her presence is making the hair stand up on the back of his neck, because she doesn’t seem like she’s about to attack him. Will’s been accosted by ghosts before, but there’s nothing malicious emanating from this girl, nothing except for the same vague, nameless sense of  _ void _ that always seems to surround the dead. She doesn’t make a move to touch him, doesn’t ask for anything, just continues to tail him as he winds his way out of the Applied Sciences building and out into the quad.

The rain from the morning has stopped, so Will shrugs off his bomber jacket and slings it over his shoulder. When there’s enough people around that no one will notice Will talking to himself, he says, with a sidelong glance in Selina’s direction, “Is there something I can do for you? Do you want me to help you move on?”

Selina hesitates, then shrugs neatly. She holds herself like a dancer, straight-backed and proud, her brown hair tumbling in shining waves around her shoulders. There’s something fiercely collected in her face, in her eyes, and something fiercely sad, too.

“Can you do that?” she asks. “Are you some kind of ghost hunter or something?”

“No,” Will says, adjusting the way the strap of his book bag is sitting on his shoulder to give him something to do with his hands. “I mean. No, I’m not a ghost hunter. Maybe, I could help. I’ve never actually tried.”

Selina looks supremely unimpressed by that. She props a hand on her hip and lifts her chin in Will’s direction. “If you’re not a ghost hunter, why can you see me? I’ve never met a living person who could see me.”

Will hesitates, then turns slightly so that his body is angled away from her, tipping his head so that she can see the shadow-colored birthmark only half-covered by his hair, spread like ink, like a thumbprint, across the back of his neck.

Selina’s eyebrows furrow for a moment in confusion, and then shoot up. “The goblin’s bride,” she says, looking like she’s considering taking a half-step away from him. “No kidding?”

“No kidding,” Will echoes.

“I feel sorry for you,” Selina informs him, flat and no-nonsense. “I’ve heard about the goblin, the older ghosts talk about him all the time. They say he was put down by his own master because he got too powerful. They say he’s burned cities to the ground without a second glance. He’s some kind of revenge spirit or something.”

Will thinks about that. He thinks about seeing Nico on the street for the first time, his suit pristine, a night-colored sword jutting shocking and stark out of his stomach, swirling with a soft, blue sort of fire. He thinks about Nico appearing with a coil of smoke in front of him at the harbor, in the park, in his house. How Nico knows things no one else should be able to know, how he looks right through Will like he’s seeing an itemized list of every person who’d come before him.

And then he thinks about Nico perched at his kitchen table, mouth full of mashed potatoes, looking at Will like Will’s the most profoundly luminescent thing he’s ever seen.

“I don’t know about all that,” Will says, carefully, “but I think, right now, he’s mostly just sad.”

Selina’s mouth tips up in a smirk. “I see,” she says, and Will feels like she means it more, somehow, than someone usually would in this situation.

“I’m late for work,” Will says, feeling deeply uncomfortable suddenly, and Selina laughs.

“I’ll see you around, then, goblin’s bride.” She spreads her arms, indicates the campus around her. “Not like I’ve got anywhere else to be.”

* * *

 

If Will’s a little distracted at work, Annabeth generously does not mention it.

The chicken shop is quiet enough that afternoon that Will’s incompetence doesn’t really affect anything important, but he knows, anyway, that he’s moving in circles. There’s something about what Selina said that’s nagging at him. Something that was contained in between the thing he _should’ve_ been fixated on: _He got_ _too powerful. He burned cities to the ground_.

_ I feel sorry for you _ .

Was Will something worth being sorry for?

“Hey, part-timer, if you’re finished there then there’s some sandwiches you could be making,” Annabeth says, without looking up from her book, and Will jumps a little, realizing with a rush of embarrassment that he’s been mopping the same spot on the floor for minutes now.

“Sorry,” he begins, immediately, but Annabeth shakes her head.

“Don’t apologize,” she says, and her words are clipped but her tone is not. She turns the page of her book, drums her fingers on the counter, and then looks up to meet his eyes. The book in her hands is old, leather-bound, heavy, not at all like one of her usual architecture textbooks or bright-covered novels. She sets it down on the counter before Will can get a good look at it.

“Will,” she says, voice serious, “are you sleeping okay?”

Will blinks. “I - yes? I mean. The same as always, I guess.”

“Your family?”

“Still out of town,” Will answers, and then he remembers a text he got that morning with a tug like nausea in his gut. “They get back tomorrow evening.”

“Huh,” Annabeth says, and Will doesn’t think he imagines the look of distaste on her face. “Feeling feverish at all?”

“No. I… I really am sorry I’ve been distracted, I just-”

Annabeth shakes her head. She looks at him for another long moment before picking up her book again and saying, decisively, “If you ever need somewhere to stay, my door is open.”

Will stares at the approximate spot her eyes would be, hidden behind the strange, off-kilter spine of her book. “Thank you,” he says, muted. “Really. It means a lot.”

Annabeth hums and Will takes it as a dismissal, so he puts the mop aside and moves behind the counter to start putting some sandwiches together, trying to keep his mind on the task instead of half a mile away on campus, where Selina is probably still standing in the quad, watching the world turn around her.

It goes marginally better than the mopping did, and Annabeth gives him a little nod when he tells her he’s finished, though he does feel her staring at the circles under his eyes.

(When he asks about the weird book, at the end of his shift, Annabeth just turns it over in her hands and says, thoughtfully, “It’s in Greek.” And then, she adds, “It just… I don’t know. Called to me.”

Will doesn’t think he knows what she means.)

* * *

 

Will doesn’t see Selina in class the next day, though he does think he might spot her hair from across the dining hall when he stops in for lunch. He picks at his food, only half-listening as Austin and Lou Ellen talk about some drama they’ve both been watching. His phone is sitting heavy in his pocket, a text from his aunt still unopened on the locked screen, and he can’t help but wish he could just summon Nico again and have him magic him a better family.

“I mean, I don’t know, I like the show’s  _ premise _ , but it’s trying to be every cliche in the book and the homophobic jokes are really a little much… Will, are you okay? You look like you’re about to be sick.”

“I’m fine,” he answers, and the lie tastes like bile on his tongue. He offers Austin and Lou Ellen a small, tense smile and closes his fist around his phone. His sandwich remains uneaten, though Lou Ellen does pilfer a couple fries from his plate before they part ways, Austin and Lou Ellen to the library and Will back to class.

Work that afternoon goes by in what feels like minutes. He helps Annabeth close up, wiping down the tables and shutting off the lights, probably lingering longer than he has to as he locks the front door. He can feel his phone vibrating in his pocket and already knows what the voicemail will say - that he’s ungrateful, that he should’ve had dinner ready for them, that without his aunt, he’d be nothing.

“You okay, kid?” Annabeth asks, and Will goes still.

He’s got his mouth open to ask Annabeth if maybe, possibly, her couch might still be open before he stops himself.

“I’m fine,” he says, instead, and gives Annabeth the same bitter smile he gave Austin and Lou Ellen. And then he says, in an unexpected rush of honesty, “She’s not that bad, really.”

“ _ Not that bad _ doesn’t mean  _ good _ ,” Annabeth says, and her voice is maybe a little tighter than normal. She says, “Text me if you need an out,” and then she’s turning to go, hands in the pockets of her jeans, leaving Will to make his way home.

The streetlights flicker on as he walks, the sky turning from blue to purple slowly, with red-gold in between. Like a bruise. The car is in the driveway when he gets home, and he’s standing outside his house, watching his aunt move around inside, shouting at his cousins loud enough for him to hear it from out on the street, when he realizes that he can’t do it.

He can’t.

Instead of opening the front door, he turns, marches to the closest convenience store, buys a lighter, walks outside, lights the flame, and then promptly blows it out.

* * *

 

The only explanation Will Solace offers him when Nico stumbles into being outside a dinky 7-Eleven at twilight is, “I wanted to see your face.”

Nico stares at him, glass of water in one hand and Wii controller in the other. He and Percy had found a tepid kind of peace in the past twenty-four hours, and they’d been soundly beating Leo at Mario Kart before Nico felt darkness inching in around his eyes and then watched the apartment spin away.

They haven’t seen each other since Nico ran from Will’s dining room. Nico holds himself completely still, prepared to run, ready to fight, waiting for Will to say something else -  _ anything  _ else.

Only, he doesn’t. He just stands there, looking down at his scuffed sneakers, lighter clutched in one hand and the other tugging at his clothes, nervous. He’s wearing an overlarge, soft pink sweatshirt and torn, pale blue jeans, his schoolbag still slung over one arm, his work uniform tucked under his elbow, and he looks… tired.  Bone-tired, like he’s forgotten what rest feels like.

Whatever Nico was planning to do - run, fight, listen, something - his plans change, automatically. Easily.

Nico says, “Wait here,” and when Will nods, he pops back to the apartment to set the Wii remote down and press his water glass into Leo’s hands, and then pops back in front of Will, holding out his hand wordlessly for Will’s bag.

“You don’t have to-” Will begins, but he passes the bag over when Nico just lifts an eyebrow silently.

He lifts the bag over his shoulder and sets off walking, not waiting to see if Will follows. It’s a moment before he feels Will’s warmth at his side again, and he leads them through the night-quiet neighborhood, the streetlights golden above their heads, last vestiges of the sunset disappearing along the city skyline. They walk in step, not close enough to touch, Nico’s hands in his pockets and Will’s eyes on the sky.

“You want to talk about it?” Nico asks, eventually, and he doesn’t know why he’s doing this, doesn’t know why Will looking like this makes his whole body feel cold. All he knows is that, when he’s with Will, suddenly the voices inside his head are not as loud, and the burning inside his chest is not as poisonous, and the ache from the sword buried in his stomach doesn’t really ache as much.

And Nico doesn’t know why.

Or, maybe he does, but he will not allow himself to hope.

Will shakes his head no, but then he hesitantly takes his phone out of his pocket and passes it to Nico. There’s about fifteen unopened texts from his aunt, each message written with increasing derision and venom, along with two voicemails and five missed calls.

“A job,” Will recites, his voice flat. “A boyfriend. A break.”

Nico hands him his phone back and says, muted, “I’m sorry.”

Will looks startled. “You’re sorry,” he says, and Nico frowns.

“You’re surprised at that?”

“I thought,” Will says, frankly, “you hated the sight of me.”

“Oh,” Nico says. He considers that, just for a moment. “No. I don’t.”

Will looks at him, and they’re standing close enough under the yellow-gold of the streetlights that Nico could count the soft scatter of freckles across his nose, can see the faded scars left by fists along his skin, can see, precisely, the moment that Will’s gaze drops, slowly, from Nico’s eyes down to his mouth.

The universe settles around Nico, in that moment, the spin of the stars and the planets going still. The voices inside his head quiet, the burning in his stomach fading to nothing. It is just him on this streetcorner with a boy with color of sunlight, and they are close enough to kiss.

Nico takes - stumbles - a single step back.

“Don’t let her touch you,” he says, his voice a little more ragged than he wants it to be. “If you need me, you know what to do.”

Will doesn’t look disappointed. The look on his face is something quieter, more resigned. He lifts the lighter in a half-salute.

Nico lets himself disappear, but not before he hears Will say, softly, “Thank you.”


	7. Chapter 7

Percy is early.

He turns the namecard in his hands over, fingers careful on the embossed face as he taps his thumb over the letters. The time listed isn’t for another forty-five minutes or so, and Jason won’t get here for at least another thirty.

_Ricardo Munoz, age 84, TOD 4:58pm. Heart attack._

Percy frowns over at the shining glass front of the restaurant he’s standing outside of. Ricardo Munoz probably isn’t even _here_ yet. Percy could be anywhere else, doing anything else.

There’s something nagging at him, though.

Something about the restaurant in front of him.

(Maybe he, too, sold chicken on a college campus in his past life?)

The heartbeat of the city rushes around him, the flow of pedestrians curving past him on the sidewalk. Even when Percy’s invisible, like he is now, people tend to skirt around him. Their eyes slide to the opposite corner of the room, their feet steer them to the other side of the street. It’s an instinct, something buried deep inside the human soul.

No one wants to walk with death.

Percy sighs and leans against a newspaper dispenser to wait. There are a couple people eating in the restaurant, but none of them look old enough to be Ricardo Munoz. They’re mostly college students. The waiter looks about the right age to be a college student, too. Percy watches him wipe down the counter, bring a table a second round of drinks, laugh and wave off one of the patron’s jokes.

Percy shifts, flips the namecard around in his hands again, reaches his arms above his head in a stretch. And, like he’d shouted rather than moved, the blond waiter goes still and looks up, across the busy sidewalk.

Directly at him.

Their eyes catch.

Percy stares. The waiter’s eyebrows scrunch together and he slowly puts down the menus he’d been straightening, his eyes on Percy, like he’s trying to ease away from a cornered animal.

So he can _see_ Percy, then. Very clearly, at that.

 _Strange_ , Percy thinks. He reaches up, runs his fingers along the brim of his hat to reassure himself that it’s still there.

The waiter’s eyes blow wide and his face goes pale. He takes a stumbling step back, gaze snapping away from Percy’s face straight down to the floor in front of him, and something tugs at Percy - an idea, half-formed, of a blond child with this waiter’s freckly face, standing alone in an empty yard, Percy’s hands on a battered namecard.

_“I know you can see me. Missing soul.”_

_“I can’t. I can’t, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t-”_

_“You can,” Percy says, and it is true, and he is sorry for it. “Will Solace. Age zero. Cause of death, hit and run.”_

“Huh,” Percy manages, under his breath. No wonder the universe wanted him to get here early.

Percy checks his watch. 4:28pm. Plenty of time to take care of the missing soul and be ready in time to escort Ricardo Munoz. He sighs and tucks Ricardo’s namecard back into his jacket, brushes dust off the sleeves of his coat, and takes off at a stride towards the restaurant. The blond waiter begins to retreat immediately, eyes everywhere but on Percy’s face, and Percy’s reaching for the door when someone steps in front of the waiter, blocking off Percy’s view.

“Will, are you okay?” the woman asks, her voice muted by the glass between them, and she’s reaching a hand out to grab Will’s shoulder. “You look terrible. Will? Hey, Will?”

“I’m fine,” the waiter - the missing soul - _Will -_ says, but Percy does not hear it. His eyes are on the woman, with her tumbling mass of bright blond curls, spilling out from under a worn Yankees cap.

Percy goes still. Reaches slowly into his pocket. The ink Annabeth wrote her phone number with has been smudged by now, a by-product of Percy reading and re-reading every individual digit until he was absolutely sure his brain wasn’t mixing them up. The paper it’s written on feels familiar by now. Worn. Percy was never going to call, though. He was never planning on seeing Annabeth again.

Something is _aching_ inside Percy, something horrible and small and sad, something that feels as much apart of him as his name, as his title. Maybe even more so.

Annabeth gently guides Will to the seat behind the counter and crosses the room to grab a water bottle out of the drink cooler. Will’s face is petal-pale beneath his freckles, his lips pressed together in a terrified line, and he’s keeping his eyes squeezed shut, his shoulders trembling as they rise and fall. He says something to Annabeth and she nods, helps Will back to his feet, and begins to lead him out of the restaurant’s dining area.

_“Her name is down, Nico. The kid’s on here, too. They’re missing souls, now. When I find them, I have to take them.”_

_“So don’t find them, then.”_

_“It’s not that easy. You and I both know the universe doesn’t take lightly to people meddling in the balance of life and death, Nico.”_

_Percy watches Nico stop walking, watches him clench his hands. Turn his head, slowly, to look at Percy over his shoulder. A single blossom falls and catches in his hair._

_“You more than anyone, I’d think, Reaper.”_

There is Something, here.

Percy steps away from the door and retreats back to the newspaper box he’d been leaning against. There’s something here he’s not putting together, something that involves Will Solace and involves the goblin and now, somehow, involves him and Annabeth with the white-gold hair. Some thread he isn’t following, some connection he cannot see.

Something from his past?

Something from before he was Percy.

(Above his head, on the roof of the restaurant, a white butterfly rests, wings beating slow.)

There is a shudder in the air next to him, a sigh, and then Jason Grace is standing where there used to be empty space. He’s got Ricardo Munoz’s namecard in one hand and his black overcoat slung over the other, shooting a sidelong glance at Percy as he settles in place.

“You’re earlier than me,” he remarks, looking impressed. “You’re never earlier than me. Am I starting to slip?”

Percy manages a noncommittal sound. Annabeth has already returned to her place behind the counter, no Will in sight, and Percy can’t help but feel a flood of relief when Jason points out a couple elderly men entering the restaurant, one of them undoubtedly Ricardo Munoz.

 _So don’t find them, then_ , Nico’s voice says, sharp, inside his mind.

 _Don’t find him_.

 _Maybe_ , Percy thinks, furiously, _I won’t_.

“It’s almost time,” Jason tells him. “Let’s go.”

* * *

 

Division 5 gets together for dinner that night, at some fancy Mediterranean restaurant uptown.

Percy picks at the bread they give them before the meal and otherwise ignores his food. The other reapers are rowdy enough that his silence goes unnoticed, at least for the most part, but he knows Jason can tell something’s wrong. He makes it a point to order Percy the bluest cocktail on the menu, promising to put it on his own tab, but the drink tastes sickly sweet and nauseating going down, and Percy can’t manage more than a couple sips.

“Percy, what’s wrong?” Jason finally asks, when dinner’s winding down and they’ve called for the check. He’s trying to be discreet, speak softly, Percy knows, but there’s something about Jason that makes people go silent when he so much as opens his mouth. The rest of the table quiets immediately, Frank slowly setting his beer down, Reyna going still mid-bite.

“Nothing,” Percy says, automatic, but half the table makes sounds of protest before he even gets the word out, and Hazel leans over to pat his hand gently.

“You can always talk to us if something’s bothering you,” she says, impassioned, but Percy doesn’t know _how_ to say this, doesn’t know how to talk through the pieces of this story that he’s missing, the parts that he’s not sure if he _wants_ to be able to put together.

Reapers collect memories like they are fragile, precious things.

They do not own their past the way other people do. Even the way other _undead_ people do. The essence of the person that used to be there _stays_ at the core of ghosts. The parts of him that made him _Percy Jackson_ when he was alive have been shaken away, scattered, sand on the shore.

Petals, scattered in the wind.

Percy doesn’t want to have this discussion because he knows it will hurt for all of them.

“I may,” Percy says, slowly, choosing his words extremely carefully, “have met someone connected to my old life.”

“No kidding,” Thalia says, eyes wide with surprise, and the rest of the table is staring at him intently now, eyes burning on his skin like brands.

(The other reapers talk about it, sometimes. Clarisse La Rue insists that she feels whispers of her past self, sometimes, when she’s looking at violence and death. Michael Yew tries to put together the history of his family, based on hundreds newspaper articles and official documents spanning decades. Ethan Nakamura occasionally talks about people, events, like he _remembers_ them, knows them like the back of his hand, only to look confused and blank when asked about it.)

“How do you know? Did you remember something?” Jason asks, intent, and Percy winces, because this - _this_ \- is exactly why he never wanted to say anything. Jason feels the absence of his memories like a wound, carries it on his back like armor. It bothers him in a way Percy doesn’t get, because even though Percy’s curious, he also knows, deep down, that he does not want to know.

“I don’t know,” Percy says. “It’s just… a weird feeling. Something’s not adding up.”

“Does it have something to do with the pickup we did today?” Jason asks, half-worried, half-hopeful, and Percy finds himself shaking his head.

“No, it’s nothing,” he hears himself say. “Just a feeling. I’m sure it’s nothing at all.”

“Maybe that’s for the best,” Hazel says, quietly, sympathy heavy on her face, and Percy knows that’s true. He was not chosen to do this job for nothing. None of them are. They are condemned all of them; this afterlife is a sentence, not a gift.

He just can’t, for the life of him, remember what the hell he did to deserve it.

“Once you know, you’ll have to live with it,” Clarisse tells him, flat. “And the reason you’re here is the same as all the rest of us. You already failed to live with it once.”

Instead of answers, instead of memories, all Percy has is nothing, nothing, nothing. Emptiness where his past should be.

“This must be,” he says, instead of answering, “the Divinity’s will.”

They finish eating in silence.

* * *

 

Percy takes the long way home. It’s dark by the time he gets back to the apartment, the sky stained orange by the city lights. The apartment is golden-bright, though, and he opens the door to the sound of Nico and Leo talking and to the gentle undercurrent of what sounds like a telenovela on TV.

“So let me make sure I’m getting this right,” Leo is saying loudly, as Percy shrugs off his coat and shuts the apartment door behind him. “You met your fated mystical other half foretold by prophets centuries ago, blah blah blah, and he happens to be a handsome tall lax-bro college student who can summon you on command. You grant his wishes like some kind of genie, almost make out with him twice, and now that you’ve finally found the dude who can yank that sword out of your stomach and end your suffering like you’ve been moaning about for years, you’re thinking you actually maybe possibly might want to live. Did I miss anything?”

“Yeah, you missed the part where I told you to go fuck yourself.”

“That was heavily implied, Uncle, please keep up.”

Percy nudges the shoes off his feet and tugs the hat off his head, stepping into the apartment to find Leo and Nico on the couch, Leo in his customary upside-down, legs-up-head-dangling sprawl, Nico cross-legged and eating Cheez-Its out of the box.

Leo waves energetically when Percy walks in. Nico doesn’t look up from his Cheez-It box, but he does tilt his head in the direction of the kitchen and say, “There are leftovers in there if you want some. Sammy brought them by.”

“We would die immediately on our own,” Leo says cheerfully, kicking his feet and reaching for a Cheez-It. Nico slaps his hand away.

“Maybe _you_ would,” he begins, peevishly.

Leo jabs him hard in the side and steals the Cheez-It box when he jerks out of the way. “Who’s the one who’s been alive for like eight million years and is currently, at this very moment, having a crisis over a boy in our living room? Me? No, wait, sorry, that was you.”

Nico scowls and munches aggressively on a cracker. “I’m not alive.”

“Okay, edgelord,” Leo says. “Give me a fuckin’ Cheez-It.”

Percy trudges into the kitchen and returns to the living room with a container of Pad Thai and a pair of chopsticks. He settles on the floor and takes a couple bites, appetite returned now that he’s about three miles and four hours removed from Annabeth and Will and the weird sense of loss they’d left in his chest. Leo’s won the battle for the Cheez-It box, but Nico snags the remote, and they end up watching an incredibly cringe-worthy episode of a television show about ghost hunting.

“There aren’t even any real ghosts in this building,” Percy points out, after about fifteen minutes of melodramatic nonsense on-screen, and Nico rolls his eyes.

“That’s what makes it funny.”

On the television, a door slams shut and the investigators react with shock and awe. Leo jumps a little and looks between the two of them.

“Are we… _sure_ there aren’t any actual ghosts in there?” he asks.

Percy nods immediately and says, “Of course not,” while Nico says, at the exact same time, “No, but there’s one in here.”

Percy’s head shoots up and Leo makes a horrified, strangled sound. The room is empty except for them, though, and Percy flashes Nico a look of confusion before he realizes that Nico’s smothering a laugh behind his hand.

“Was that a _joke_?” Percy accuses, jabbing his chopsticks in Nico’s direction. “Did you just make a _joke_ , General?”

Nico looks affronted. “I joke!” he says, “All the time! Why does everyone act so surprised when I make a joke!”

Leo snorts and coos, “Why, did Will react the same way?” and Percy is choking with laughter as Nico pelts Leo with Cheez-Its before he fully realize what Leo had just said.

“Wait,” he manages, choking down heavy breaths. “Wait, hang on. Will?”

Leo snickers. “Nico’s _boyfriend_ -”

“Shut the fuck up, Valdez.”

“Nico _lo~ves_ him-”

“You’re the worst person I fucking know.”

“Nico wants to _smooch_ -”

The rest of Leo’s sentence is drowned out by Nico attempting to smother him with a pillow. Percy sits stock-still, food forgotten in his hands. It takes a couple minutes for Percy to put together enough words to form the question, “Does he work at a chicken shop, by any chance?”

Nico freezes, pillow still smushed against Leo’s face. His face has gone perfectly, carefully blank, and Percy knows Nico well enough to recognize the creeping danger that comes with this kind of expression.

Leo’s voice, muffled, squeaks, “Yeah! Want to see his Facebook page?”

_You and I both know the universe doesn’t take lightly to people meddling in the balance of life and death, Nico._

“Oh,” Percy says. “Oh.”

And then, stupidly, he says, “That would explain why the waiter at that chicken shop was a missing soul, then.”

There is a moment of stillness, of silence. And then the air ripples, and then Nico is on him, a hand fisted in his collar, shoving Percy up against the wall. His eyes are burning, blazing, and for a second this - _this_ \- is familiar, Percy can’t place it, but Nico’s face is bloodstains and battlefields and a warning, a _warning_.

A curse.

“What,” Nico demands, and his voice is low, thrumming with the kind of power Percy hasn’t felt in a long, long time, “did you do to him?”

“Nothing,” Percy says, leaning away, Nico’s knuckles burning hot against his collarbone. “I didn’t… take him. I swear it, Nico. I promise. He’s still here.”

“You didn’t take him,” Nico says, and he stares into Percy’s face for what feels like an eon before letting go of his collar. He steps away, slowly, hands lowering down to his sides. Percy slowly relaxes, unsticks himself from the wall.

“Stay away from him,” Nico says, low and calm. “Don’t touch him. Don’t you dare.”

“I won’t,” Percy says, even though he doesn’t think he’s qualified to make this kind of promise. Even though it would mean a hell of an inquiry at work. And then, because the place where Nico grabbed him is smarting, and because Percy’s never been very good at keeping his mouth shut, he adds, “That kid is your tragedy, not mine.”

Nico collapses back into his seat on the couch, reaching out for the Cheez-It box. This time, Leo lets him take it without complaint, his eyes perfectly round and shocked.

“I know,” Nico says. “And I am his.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "okay edgelord give me a fuckin’ cheez-it" is the best line I've ever written ever and i can assure you that it must surely be all downhill from here
> 
> also i am so sorry for the lack of will in this one but next time... ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)


	8. Chapter 8

When Will gets home that night, bookbag slung haphazard over one shoulder, sweaty and grease-stained from manning the fryers, Nico di Angelo is sitting on his doorstep.

He looks supremely, fantastically out of place in Will’s aunt’s front yard, his hairstyle messy and perfect, leather boots propped lazily up on the stoop beside him, the sleeves of his charcoal-colored dress shirt folded up to his elbows. There’s a pitch-dark suitcoat flung across his lap that probably cost more than Will’s entire outfit combined. He is beautiful and absurd, like someone hung a Botticelli on the wall of a kindergarten classroom.

Will pauses on the sidewalk, hand coming up to tug on the strap of his bookbag. Nico’s face is tilted up towards the sky, his eyes squeezed tightly shut, and the moonlight makes his skin look smooth and brown and flawless.

The sword in his stomach pulses with a just-barely-there blue light, and Will watches Nico breathe.

It is a moment before Will regains his own ability to breathe, before he manages to ask, “What are you doing here?” At the sound of his voice, Nico’s eyes snap open. There’s something on his face - anger, maybe, something frantic and fierce - and Will is about to ask what’s wrong when the air around them seems to fold inwards. And then suddenly, with a curl of smoke-like shadow, Nico is right in front of him, his hands on Will’s face.

“Are you,” he says, half-growls, low, just loudly enough for Will to hear, “okay?”

Will drops his bookbag by accident, preoccupied with holding himself completely still as Nico’s hands tilt his head from side to side and then up towards the light, brush his neck, bump down to his shoulders. It takes a second, his brain churning frantically to keep up with the headiness of sudden contact, before he remembers why Nico would be worried in the first place, what had happened that afternoon.

He remembers the panic he felt, seeing the man in black out on the sidewalk today, but that panic feels distant, now. Impossible to assemble from what he’s feeling right now, which is a mixture of shocked and fluttery and very, very fond.

“Will,” Nico says, “please say something.”

Nico is terribly close. Inches away, really, hands on Will’s arms now, and Will can _feel_ the blush spreading over the tips of his ears, on the back of his neck. He feels helplessly awkward, too large for his limbs, so he just stands there and lets Nico touch him.

“I,” Will says, and it comes out sounding pathetically strangled, so he tries again. “He didn’t… he didn’t even come inside, he just stayed out on the sidewalk... Nico, who _was_ that?”

“I know he didn’t come inside, Will. I _asked_ if you’re okay,” Nico says, and when Will finally nods, Nico’s hands linger on his shoulders for just a moment longer before dropping away. Will feels the lack of his touch acutely, painfully, as Nico takes a half-step back and reaches up to shove a hand roughly through his hair.

He announces, looking exhausted, “God. Fuck. This scared the shit out of me. Christ.”

“I’ve seen that man before,” Will says, slowly. “He’s not a ghost, but not in the same way you aren’t a ghost. I just don’t know how to explain it. I saw him-”

His voice breaks despite his best efforts to keep his tone neutral. The truth was, standing there in the middle of Annabeth’s restaurant, looking the man in black in the eyes, Will had felt nine years old again. He had felt like he’d just lost his mom all over again, had felt like he was about to lose himself. In his memory, his mother’s voice had said, “He’ll find you, he’ll take you.”

_Missing soul_ , the man had called him, all those years ago.

_Will Solace. Age zero. Cause of death, hit and run_.

And absurdly, he’d thought to himself, _Too bad the vegetable lady isn’t here to help you this time_.

“He is not a ghost,” Nico confirms. “But, yeah. He’s not like me, either.”

“What _is_ he, Nico?”

Nico’s looking at him, steady, steady. He does not falter when he says, “The Grim Reaper.”

Will blanches. His hands are shaking again, and he must visibly be trembling, because Nico reaches out to touch him again, to cup the back of his neck with a hand, thumb tracing slow circles at the soft juncture where his neck meets his ear.

“Breathe, Will,” Nico says, both commanding and kind at once, so Will does. He breathes, and he listens, and Nico continues.

“You’re… overdue,” Nico explains, quietly. “You were supposed to die, a long time ago, and you didn’t. You were… _given_ more time, allowed to live when fate said your time was up. That makes you a missing soul, at least according to them.” He stops and frowns. “Fucking reapers and their bureaucratic bullshit.”

Will curls his hands into the hem of his sweatshirt. “And so…. when the… the _grim reaper_ saw me today…”

“He was supposed to escort you On immediately. That’s what’s supposed to happen with missing souls. According to the ‘handbook,’ or what-the-fuck ever.”

It is striking Will, just now, just how incredibly close he had been to dying that day. Nico’s tone is matter-of-fact, though, and his touch is grounding, so Will focuses on that - he anchors himself to it, rather than on the idea of _On_.

“He didn’t do that, though,” Will says. “Why?”

“I don’t know,” Nico says, and he shrugs with one shoulder. “I think maybe something distracted him before he could, but he didn’t want to talk about it.”

“He didn’t want to…” Will pauses, turns that over in his head. Processes. “Hang on, Nico. How did you _know,_ though? About any of this? Did you hear my thoughts again, or-?”

“Oh,” Nico says. “No, I didn’t. That reaper is my roommate.”

His roommate.

_His roommate_?

“Oh,” Will squeaks. “Oh. Okay. Right, yeah. That makes perfect sense. Of course your roommate is the grim reaper.”

Nico frowns, dropping his hand from Will’s neck and shoving it into his pocket roughly. “I didn’t _ask_ for him to move in. I told my, um. Leo. Well, whatever. I told Leo he could rent out one of the spare rooms when I was planning on moving to South Korea but then I decided to stay and by then Percy had already signed the lease and I didn’t even _know_ he was the one Leo had-”

Will clears his throat. “Wait, hang on. South Korea?”

Nico pauses, and then - Will’s jaw almost drops in shock - his face flushes dark red and his gaze shoots to the ground.

“I,” he says, primly, “was looking for a change of pace.”

Will lifts an eyebrow and crosses his arms over his chest. “Yeah? When was this?”

Nico goes, if possible, even redder. “Three... weeks ago?”

“So about when we met, then,” Will supplies, trying for a thoughtful tone and ended up with something more like suppressed laughter.

Nico scowls at him. “I was _looking_ for a change of _pace_ -”

“You were running away from me,” Will corrects him, grinning, “oh, my God, you totally were, Nico-”

“I think it was a completely valid reaction to have, considering the situation!”

“You truly have the emotional capacity of a teaspoon, oh, my God, I’m actually screaming-”

“You could summon me with your mind, Will! That was kind of freaking me out!”

“Are you sure it wasn’t because of the fact that I’m your bride?”

Nico freezes, and it takes Will a second to realize what he’d just said. Nico’s face has gone very still, his eyes wide and startled and maybe a little wounded.

Will winces. “Sorry. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have gone there-”

“No,” Nico says. “That was why. You’re right.”

“Oh.” Will goes still. “Oh.”

There’s something small and hurt opening up inside his chest, something that feels a hell of a lot like rejection. He shouldn’t be surprised, though, should he? Just how many times has Nico ran away from this, refused to have the conversation, stepped away instead of leaning forward? Shouldn’t it have been obvious by now that Nico wasn’t the one that wanted this?

“I’m sorry,” Will repeats, his voice an embarrassed mumble. “I keep imposing myself on you. I… I don’t know what I was thinking.”

Nico blinks. “What are you talking about?”

“Clearly,” Will says, stiffly, trying very hard to preserve the last vestiges of his dignity, “I have been forcing my company on you from the beginning. I’ve failed to consider your feelings. Please forgive me.”

“Forgive-?” Nico’s eyebrows push together, his face a mixture of horrified and baffled. “Wait. It’s not - hang on, Will, it’s not because of _you_ -”

Will gives a short, hard laugh. “It’s not you, it’s me?”

“It’s not,” Nico says. “It’s - I don’t-”

“You can tell me to get lost,” Will announces. “I won’t be hurt, I’ll take the hint this time-”

Nico surges forward and kisses him.

Will’s mind grinds to a halt, Nico’s mouth presses firm and warm against his, and before he can fully process what’s happening, Nico steps away.

“It’s not,” he says, firmly, “because of you.”

Will says, very eloquently, “Oh.”

Nico looks like he doesn’t know whether to be amused or injured. “Ah. Sorry. Was it that bad?”

“No! No, it was-” Nico lifts an eyebrow, so Will shuts that train of thought down and tries again. “I just don’t… I don’t understand what you’re thinking. You just keep running from me, and then right when I think I’ve caught up, you pull away again. I don’t want to just keep chasing you, Nico.”

Nico hesitates, then says, carefully, “For me, finding my bride means something different than for most people. When I met you, when you were so… _you_ , I didn’t know what to do around you, how to act. I still don’t.”

“How about just being yourself?” Will jokes, and Nico frowns.

“I’m worried,” he says, “that I’ve already given you way too much of myself.”

“Nico,” Will says. Gentle. “Whatever it means, for both of us, I am your bride. And I made up my mind,” he continues, and when he reaches out, cautiously cups Nico’s cheek in his hand, Nico doesn’t flinch. “Hey. I made up my mind.”

“To what?” Nico whispers, and Will smiles, his lips very, very close to Nico’s face.

“To love you,” he says.

* * *

 

(“To love you,” he says, and Nico wants to scream because no, no. This is not what he wants. This is not something he can have.

The goblin’s bride is supposed to end him. Not give him a reason to live.

“ _Will_ ,” Nico says, urgent and frightened and a little desperate, and Will bumps his nose against Nico’s jaw.

“Don’t worry,” he says. “We’ll figure it out.”

And Nico turns his head, slow, careful, drawn into Will like magnetism, and their mouths bump and brush, Will’s hand flattening out against Nico’s cheek. Nico’s insides are on fire, the voices inside his head dead silent. Will’s mouth opens against Nico’s, warm, and he breathes springtime into his lungs.

_Set my soul to rest_ , Nico wants to say.

But, for the first time, it feels like he means something different.)

* * *

 

 

 

**105 CE**

“General, you need to eat.”

Nico hears the words in the same way people hear the wind between trees or the call of birdsong, the way he’s come to hear the clash of steel. He lets them wash over him, presses his eyes shut, tries to remember what peace felt like, once upon a time.

“General. Please.” A hand. Not on his shoulder, on the desk in front of him, but still close enough to make his stomach turn, to make him want to crawl out of his skin, to shake himself out until he’s nothing but scattered pieces.

“Thank you, Lieutenant,” he makes himself say, in the practiced, neutral voice he’s long since perfected, “but I am not hungry.”

“All due respect, General, but it was not a request. You’ve had nothing to eat since we buried her.”

Nico’s eyes are closed, but he still sees the way the earth closes around Bianca, the way snowflakes dot her hair and eyelashes like stars, the way his breath turns to mist in the air in front of him but the air around her stays clear. He sees it like he’s still standing there, like the moment has frozen around him, and he wonders if maybe he will keep seeing it until the day he dies.

“I should have been here,” he hears himself breathe, hands curled into fists, fingernails digging into his palms hard enough to hurt. “I should have been with her, I should never have let her go to the border alone.”

“That was not your decision to make.”

It was not. Bianca went to war for the empire the same as he did, wielded a sword the same as he did, volunteered for the mission the same way he would have if he had been there the day the emperor’s captain of the guard had asked.

But he hadn’t been there, and she had, and now she is dead.

“It is not your fault,” his lieutenant is saying, her voice softer than usual, steel replaced by sympathy.

“If not mine, then whose?” He can feel blood, slick on his palms where he’s broken the skin. “Is it Bianca’s? The emperor’s? The Divinity’s? Your-”

He pauses, collects himself, keeps himself from biting out the truth of it, the name of the person he will always blame, because he knows saying it will hurt her more than it will hurt him. She is not the person he wants to hurt.

“I think,” his lieutenant says, in that careful way she has, like she’s choosing every word, one by one. “I think, General, that when humans cannot face something, blame is the shield that they hide behind.”

Nico opens his hands and looks up. Across his desk, she stands at attention, sword at her side, hair swept into the bun she wears for official meetings. She’s still dressed in the black mourning uniform Nico refused to wear.

“Blame is not a shield, Lieutenant Chase,” Nico tells her. “It is a weapon.”

“That,” Annabeth answers, pushing his untouched tray of food into his hands, “depends on how you wield it.”

(Nico thinks about that, two years later, a sword in his stomach and the light long faded from Annabeth’s eyes. He thinks about it when he continues to live, on and on and on, when he visits Annabeth’s grave, when he notices the flowers left behind - blue, blue, blue as the noontime sky.)

Blame, he thinks, is not a weapon or a shield.

Blame, he thinks, is a memory.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [nico voice] and we were roommates-  
> [will voice] oh my god they were /roommates/
> 
>  
> 
> also, really quickly, i wanted to write a small note about annabeth's role in her past life! i know historically women didn't often hold high-raking roles in imperial armies, but... well to be honest i'm going to completely disregard that. i figure this au has an undead goblin man with magic powers rooming with the grim reaper and running into god from time to time so annabeth being an awesome soldier way back in the day doesn't seem like too much of a stretch


	9. Chapter 9

_This,_ Percy informs himself, right before walking into Annabeth Chase’s chicken restaurant, _is one of the stupidest things you’ve ever done_. _Including but not limited to moving in with an undead demigod and his shopaholic mortal best friend. And whatever you did to deserve becoming a grim reaper._

_Jeez, you’ve done a lot of stupid things_.

The bell over the door chimes softly as Percy pushes his way into the restaurant, his reaper’s hat tucked under his arm just in case he needs to make a speedy escape. The restaurant is filled with mostly students and young families, and Percy feels horrifically out of place in his black dress shirt and peacoat.

One of the waitstaff - not Will Solace, a girl he doesn’t recognize with green, dip-dyed hair and an easy smile - waves him in and tells him to seat himself, and she comes around with a menu a second later.

“Flag me down when you’d like to order,” the waitress tells him cheerfully, and Percy makes a noise that must sound like confirmation, because she grins at him and moves on to the next table.

Percy picks up his menu and peers around the restaurant over the top of it. Will Solace definitely isn’t here, which Percy figures is probably a good thing, given that Nico would most likely kick his ass into next week if he got within fifteen feet of the kid. There’s another unfamiliar waiter with his hair plaited into cornrows making the rounds, but no one else that looks like they work here.

There’s something like disappointment beginning to settle in over him now, and that’s very stupid - this whole thing is so stupid, a terrible idea, really, Percy should seriously just leave now-

Someone drops into the seat across the table from him and says, “Hello, again.”

Percy freezes. His eyes feel about a mile wide as he peeks nervously over the top of his menu and meets Annabeth Chase’s gray gaze.

She half-lifts a hand in a two-fingered wave.

“Do you remember me?” she asks. “We met a few days ago, at the open-air market? You cried.”

“I,” Percy says. His tongue does not seem to be communicating with his brain. “Yes. No. Well, yes. I remember. And, yes, I guess I cried, too...”

“Hm,” Annabeth says. She props her chin on a hand and tilts her head. “Is this a coincidence, then? I did give you my number and you never called, so I assumed you didn’t-”

“I don’t have a phone,” Percy says, probably more earnestly than is appropriate given the situation.

“You don’t have a phone?” Annabeth repeats, looking alarmed. “Seriously? You don’t need to give me a line, you know, I’m really not insulted if you’re not interested.”

“I am serious,” Percy says. “I’m so serious. Serious as the grave.”

Annabeth’s mouth curves up into a small smile. “Okay, then.” She reaches out with a hand, and Percy hesitates for just a second before shaking it. Annabeth’s hand is warm and soft and Percy is feeling more and more foolish by the second. “I’m Annabeth, but you already know that. What’s your name?”

“Percy,” Percy says, again too quick and too earnest.

Annabeth hums. “Nice to meet you, Percy,” she says. “Are you here for that book, then?”

“The… the book?” Percy asks, and Annabeth nods.

“The one you cried over,” she prompts him, reaching up to tuck a coil of hair behind her ear. “I finished it earlier today, actually, if you’d like to take it. Or even if you just want to take another look. It’s out back.”

“Oh,” Percy manages, “oh, okay, sure. I. Thanks.”

Annabeth smiles again, and Percy’s heart is in his throat, his hands sweaty and fidgety.

“Give me one sec,” she says, and if Percy had to estimate he’d say that he has about six heart attacks in the time it takes for her to walk to the counter and return, book in hand this time. She hands it over to him, across the table.

“It was interesting,” she says. “Not in English, though. Latin, actually. Do you read Latin?”

“I… don’t know. I didn’t know it was in Latin,” Percy says, and he turns the book over in his hands. It feels like it weighs a hundred pounds, a thousand, and God, _God_ it feels familiar in his palms - the leather, the curve of the spine, the cloth-soft paper.

What is happening to him?

“It’s actually kind of an odd coincidence,” Annabeth says thoughtfully, peering from his face to the book in his hands. “The person who this journal belonged to was named Perseus. Is that what your name is short for?”

“I’m not sure,” Percy says, before he can think better of it.

“You’re not sure what your name is short for?” Annabeth asks, and she sounds surprised, and Percy wants to kick himself.

“I… have amnesia. A bit,” Percy mutters.

Annabeth blinks. “Amnesia.”

“I. Sort of. It’s complicated.”

“Okay,” Annabeth says. “You do understand that that’s kind of difficult to believe, right?”

“I know,” Percy mumbles, and he can feel himself going red under the weight of her gaze. “Sorry.”

“You don’t have to apologize,” Annabeth says. “Is that why you were so emotionally impacted by that book, then? You thought it might have something do with your past?”

“It’s kind of hard to say.”

Percy flips the book open, careful not to break the spine or disturb any of the fragile pages. The book really is written in Latin, in a funny, scrawling, slanted kind of handwriting. Percy recognizes it immediately, even like this, even shaped around unfamiliar words in a language Percy doesn’t know.

He recognizes the handwriting because it is his.

What is _happening_ to him?

“Could I... borrow this?” Percy hears himself ask, his voice hoarse.

Annabeth waves a hand. “Of course. It’s yours, if you want it. I want you to take it.”

“Thank you-”

“On one condition.”

Percy looks up from the book in his hands. “What condition?”

Annabeth says, “Have a coffee with me.”

Percy stares.

She laughs and shrugs, her smile turning a little self-deprecating. “I’m joking, of course. You can have it either way. But you… stuck with me, after we met that day. I’m not sure why, and I’d like to find out, if you’d be okay with that.”

“I,” Percy begins, fully intending to inform her that he can never see her again except maybe when she dies, and then his brain shorts out, and before he can stop himself, he blurts out, “Okay.”

Annabeth’s smile softens and she says, “Good. I hadn’t figured out the best way to gracefully shake off the blow to my ego if you’d said no. Are you free tomorrow mid-morning?”

Percy’s mind files automatically through the namecards he’d been handed for the next day. An old woman at four in the morning, a shooting at six, a stroke at noon.

“Is ten-thirty okay?” he asks, and Annabeth nods and gets to her feet.

“I’ll meet you outside,” she says, and Percy makes a squeaking sound that acceptably resembles, _Okay_.

He walks home that night in a daze, twisting his hat between his hands. When he gets to the apartment, Leo’s in his habitual position upside-down on the couch and Nico’s cooking dinner.

“Long day?” Leo asks, when Percy drops down to sit at the kitchen table and almost misses the chair.

“Is my name short for Perseus?” Percy asks Nico.

Nico goes still for half a moment, lifting his head up from where he’s chopping vegetables. “Your name is whatever the Divinity let you keep, right? Shouldn’t you know better than anyone?”

“I should know lots of things,” Percy mumbles, and then he turns to Leo. “Do most people speak Latin?”

“No, they do not,” Leo says. And then he spreads his hands out wide and says, “Are you drunk or something? You look like someone just punched you really hard in the throat.”

“No,” Percy says. And then he hesitates, and whispers in Leo’s direction, “What do people wear to get coffee?”

Leo’s eyebrows shoot up, his hands flying up to clap against his face. “Oh, my God, do you have a _date_ -?”

“Wear green.” Percy lifts his head, surprised, but Nico doesn’t look over at him as he continues, “It’ll look good with your eyes.”

“Oh.” Percy blinks. “Okay. Thank you.”

Nico hums noncommittally and dumps his chopped vegetables into a skillet.

The next morning Percy shows up outside Annabeth’s restaurant ten minutes early, in a dark green t-shirt and Leo’s faded skinny jeans. He smiles too big when Annabeth greets him and tries very, very hard to answer her questions - even the ones about his work and his age and his family.

And when Annabeth says, “Let’s do this again,” Percy answers, immediately, “Yes.”

They meet four times before Percy realizes that he, an immortal messenger of Death itself, is dating a mortal graduate student who owns a chicken restaurant.

They meet another two before he starts to panic.

* * *

 

Nico is waist-deep in paperwork when Percy knocks on his door. Sammy Valdez is well beyond the age of retirement at this point, and trying to figure out a temporary solution while Leo trains to inherit the company is becoming daunting at best and impossible at worst. He’s flipped through piles and piles of potential interim CEOs, checked and double-checked stacks of applications.

Names and faces are swimming in front of him by the time Percy knocks, and there’s a tiny bubble of relief inside him when he opens the door to see Percy standing there.

(Not that he would ever tell Percy that. Obviously.)

“What’s the problem?” Nico asks, and Percy must take the open door to mean _come in_ , because he shuffles inside Nico’s room and sits down heavily on the end of his bed.

“Yeah, sure, make yourself at home,” Nico mutters, and he shoves the pen he’d been using behind his ear and crosses his arms over his chest.

“Nico,” Percy begins, and he’s speaking uncharacteristically cautiously, like he’s screening his words before he says them. “You’re dating Will Solace, right?”

Nico’s eyebrows shoot upwards. “Why?”

Percy wrings his hands together, fidgets on his seat. “I. Well.”

“Does this have anything to do with the coffee date you had last week?” Nico asks, his voice about as disinterested in that prospect as physically possible, and Percy immediately turns pink.

“Maybe,” he grumbles. “Listen, just… Okay. Hypothetically speaking, imagine you were, say, not able to remember your past. Hypothetically.”

“Okay,” Nico says, his voice very even, and Percy winces.

“Sorry,” he says. Nico rolls his eyes and waves him off. “Okay, so. You’re not able to remember your past, right? And one day, you’re just - working, you know, just doing your usual thing, and you… meet someone, and that someone makes you feel… something? Not like you’ve remembered something, but more like you know what you’ve forgotten.” He stops, twists his hands together again. “That… makes no sense, right?”

“Right,” Nico says, but Percy looks so desolate that he sighs and adds, “but I get what you’re saying.”

“You do?”

Nico waves his hand again.

Percy continues, “Right, okay, so. You meet someone, and they help you put some pieces back in place, and then she… she gives you an item-”

“An item,” Nico echoes. “Like in a videogame or something?”

“Sort of.” Percy scrubs a hand through his hair. “And let’s say, hypothetically, the item she gives you was definitely yours, from a really long time ago. Only you can’t remember owning it, for reasons previously stated.”

Nico blinks.

Whatever he was expecting to hear, it was certainly not this.

“And also,” Percy is plowing on, his voice speeding up with every word, “let’s say that this person is hypothetically currently employing the goblin’s bride.”

The pen falls out from behind Nico’s ear.

Percy grabs one of Nico’s pillows and holds it at arm’s length like he’s deciding whether or not to scream into it.

“Maybe,” a voice says, at the door, and Percy and Nico both jump and turn to face Leo, leaning on the doorjamb. Nico’s eyebrows furrow as Leo tilts his head, his eyes a little brighter than usual, a tiny, unfamiliar smile pulling at the corner of his mouth. “Maybe your past is beginning to leak through.”

Percy and Nico stare at him.

Leo lifts an eyebrow. “If you seek out answers, you’ll find them,” he says. “If you grab at the past, it’ll grab at you, too.”

And then he yawns, and the weird intensity in his face evaporates. “Night, guys,” he says, and shuffles off.

“Goodnight,” Nico calls after him.

Percy shoots a startled look at Nico. Nico shrugs back.

On the windowsill outside, a single white butterfly takes flight.

* * *

 

When Will finishes class on Friday, he leaves the building to see a very familiar figure on the sidewalk outside. Nico turns around to look at him as he heads down the steps, and Will almost trips over his own feet when Nico pulls one of his hands out of the pocket of his leather jacket to wave a little sheepishly.

He jogs of the rest of the way to Nico’s side and pulls up next to him. There are about a thousand things he can think of to say, but none of them seem quite right, so he just settles on, “Hey.”

Nico huffs out a breath through his nose. “Hey, yourself. Was class okay?”

“It was fine,” Will answers, and then he gasps and drops his voice very low. “Wait, shit, does it look like I’m talking to myself right now? Can other people see you?”

“Other people can see me when I want them to see me.” Nico shrugs, and then gives Will the barest hint of a smile. “Right now, I don’t really mind being seen.”

Will beams. “Because you’re with me?”

“No, because this shirt is new.”

Will yanks Nico’s beanie down over his eyes and Nico giggles - honest-to-god _giggles_ , the smallest laugh Will’s ever heard in his entire life. He clutches his chest and swoons backwards dramatically and Nico aims a grumpy elbow at his side.

“What’s going on, though?” Will asks once they’re done jabbing their elbows at each other. “Did something happen with that grim reaper or something?”

“Hm,” Nico says. “Not really.”

Will furrows his eyebrows. “Then…”

“Actually, I came to ask you on a date.”

Will freezes almost comically quickly.

“A date?”

“A date,” Nico confirms. “Unless you wanted to skip right to marriage, Mr. _I’ve-Made-Up-My-Mind-To_ -?”

“Okay, that’s enough!” Will squeaks, slapping a hand over Nico’s mouth.

Nico says, his hand muffled by Will’s palm, “So that’s a no to the date then?”

Will pouts at him for a moment, Nico blinking at him innocently from above Will’s hand, before Will drops his hand away from Nico’s mouth and groans.

“Okay, you embarrassing jerk, take me on a date, then.”

Nico shoots him a thumbs-up and says, “Follow me.” And then he spins and heads up the stairs to the hall Will had just come out of.

Will says, blankly, “Is our date in my bio lecture hall?”

“Ye of little faith,” Nico says, primly. “Just follow.”

He swings open the door and steps through, holding it out for Will to follow. Will hesitates a second, then steps through. He doesn’t step into the hallway of a university science building, though; instead, the door opens out onto a crowded market square, quiet music playing somewhere far in the background and the sun beginning to set above the horizon. The air smells like fried food and baking bread, and as they emerge out onto the street, someone bumps into Will’s shoulder and apologizes in a language that is most certainly not English.

“How,” Will whispers, “the fuck.”

“Surprise,” Nico says, and if Will didn’t know him as well as he does, he would’ve missed the tiny hint of smugness in his voice. “Welcome to Osaka.”

“Osaka,” Will says. “I don’t even have a passport.”

“Well, lucky for you, you’ve got me,” Nico says, and then he takes off walking down the street, leaving Will to jog after him.

The market street seems to flicker like firelight as they make their way from stall to stall, the sky slowly fading to from blue to pink and orange and yellow, spilled like water above their heads. The crimson lanterns strung between the buildings light one by one, and between the warmth of the air and the golden light, it feels like they’ve stepped into a bonfire, like they’re standing inside flame.

“Are you hungry?” Nico asks, and Will makes it his mission to try every type of street food this market has to offer; Nico lets Will tug him from stall to stall with a poorly-concealed smile on his face, and shamelessly wipes cream off his cheek when he bites into a fish-shaped pastry and the red bean filling smears.

They shop around, Will pointing out fashion he thinks Nico would look good in and Nico pointing idly to cardboard cutouts of idols or Pokemon phone cases to ask what the hell they are. Will buys Nico a Gudetama keychain and Nico buys Will a ridiculously large-brimmed sunhat.

“How do I look, how do I look?” Will chirps, leaning down close to Nico’s face, and Nico yanks the sunhat down over his eyes too late to keep Will from seeing his blush.

Hours pass in a rush of noise and sound, Nico occasionally stopping to buy something, speaking to the shopkeepers in what sounds to Will to be perfect Japanese. Before long, the sky has become inky and dark, and Will is feeling sleepy and blissful and very, very fond of the boy standing next to him.

Nico must notice his energy waning, because he draws them aside from the crowd to sit at a bench along a canal, the lanterns reflecting in the water - stars above and stars below. The crowd is thinner here, the noise down to a dull roar, and Will wishes he could save this moment, keep it pressed inside him forever.

Preserve it, protect it.

Remember.

“Nico,” he says, quietly, and Nico hums softly. “Why me?”

Nico turns to look at him, his chin lifting and his eyebrows furrowing. “What do you mean?”

“I mean… why, out of everyone… for all these years…” He reaches up and touches the inkblot birthmark on the back of his neck. “Why me?”

Nico says, “Ah,” and leans back on his hands, turning his face to look up at the sky. “Before you were born, your mother was hit by a car. Did you know that?”

Will blinks. “No, I… she never mentioned that. Was it bad?”

Nico sighs and closes his eyes. “She was supposed to die that night,” he says. “But I heard her. She prayed for help, for God to save her. God wasn’t listening, but I was.

“She was pregnant with you,” Nico says, and he opens his eyes and turns to look at Will. “I saved her, and she had you, and you were both supposed to die that night. You both should have died.”

“Is that why, then?” Will asks, his voice hushed. “Why I’m your bride? Why you called me a… a missing soul?”

“That is why you’re a missing soul,” Nico confirms, “but I don’t believe it’s why you’re my bride.”

“Then-”

“I think,” Nico says, his voice low, “that maybe the Divinity finally heard me.”

Will looks at him, long and hard, at the way the soft light makes his face look younger, rounder. And he wonders, if they had met under different circumstances, in a different life, he still would’ve looked at Nico and seen _home_.

“What does this mean?” Will finally manages. “When you found out what I am, you panicked. The way you reacted… Nico, I don’t know anything about all this magical stuff, but I do know that you weren’t happy to meet me.”

“I…” Nico begins, and then he frowns. “If I tell you, you’ll freak out.”

“Probably,” Will acknowledges. “Tell me anyway.”

“It might hurt you.”

“Understandable, continue.”

“Will, I don’t _want_ to hurt you.”

“Nico, I _need to know_.”

Nico goes still and lowers his head, clasps his hands carefully in his lap. Inches above, the sword in his stomach glows with pale blue light.

“When I was twenty years old,” he whispers. “I died. I came home from a battle I’d won, from a war we never would, and my emperor took my own sword and stabbed me with it. I died. I died, Will. And then I woke up.”

Will’s breath turns to ice inside his lungs. His blood is frozen in his veins.

“I knew what it meant,” Nico continues. “To have life when I should have been left to decay. It meant I’d live, and I’d live, and I’d live, until someone finally pulled this sword out.”

He squeezes his hands together tight before looking up at Will.

“ _‘General_ ,’” he recites, his voice very even, “‘ _you must find your bride. She is the only one who will be able to remove that sword and set your soul to rest_.’”

Will cannot breathe.

He cannot think.

“I am destined to love you, Will,” Nico finishes. “And you are destined to kill me.”

(A little too late for luck, now.)

Will doesn’t know what to do with himself, with his limbs, with the frantic rush of his heart in his chest and the blood in his veins.

“Okay,” he rasps. “Okay, so, we… We wait, right? We wait until I’m old, I grow old with you, we have a life together, Nico, and then… and then I pull it out.”

“And if you die before then?” Nico asks, but his voice is very gentle, and it sounds like a platitude rather than a challenge.

Will looks stricken.

Nico smiles wryly and leans back again, tipping his head up and letting his eyes flutter shut. “I’ve been thinking about it for months now,” he says. “I’ve been waiting to die for a long time, Will. It wasn’t until I met you that I realized I wanted to live.”

“What do we _do_ , Nico?” Will whispers, his voice broken and small. “What do I...?”

“It would be best to do it quickly, don’t you think?” Nico muses, and panic flares in Will’s chest before he adds, “I don’t think I’m brave enough for that, though.”

He tilts his head towards Will and opens one eye to look at him. “This is probably selfish, but for now, let me have this,” he says, and Will doesn’t think he’s talking to him, anymore. Not really. “Let me live, remembering what it’s like to want to. And then…”

Will says, fiercely, “I won’t.”

Nico huffs a tiny laugh. “You might not have a choice.”

Will reaches out and cups Nico’s cheek with his hand. “Seriously, Nico, I won’t,” he says. “I won’t kill you, I won’t take the sword out, I can’t do it. I can’t.”

“I’m sorry,” Nico tells him, quietly. “I never wanted to have to ask this of you. I never imagined loving you, Will. I never imagined wanting you to love me back.”

Will’s crying a bit, he thinks. Nico reaches over and brushes the tears away with his fingertips, just the barest hint of a touch.

“We have time,” Nico says, “until we don’t. But that’s the way that it always is.”

And then he gets to his feet and holds a hand out, waits for Will to take it. “Where next?” he asks. “Paris? Rio? Dubai? Name it.”

Will squeezes Nico’s hand and stands up, leans in. Takes advantage of the darkness and the shadow to step in close and let his lips graze Nico’s ear.

“Home,” Will whispers, and he sees the back of Nico’s neck flush red.

“Okay,” Nico whispers, and then he’s pushing Will gently backwards, up against the side door of the building behind them, and he fumbles with the knob for only a second before pushing it open. They stumble backwards, this time into a bedroom that Will recognizes immediately to be Nico’s, from the sweaters flung over the furniture to the books stacked on the shelves.

“Yes?” Nico whispers, and Will says, “Yes.”

When they kiss, Will’s mind goes blank. He presses his hands to the flat of Nico’s back and crushes them together, bending down as Nico pushes himself up, and Will closes his eyes and lets the feeling take him apart. Lets Nico’s hands and his mouth and the taste of his tongue scatter him to the winds.

  
  
  


 

 

 

They breathe.

  
  
  
  
  


 

 

 

In a restaurant miles away, Annabeth Chase runs her hands over a single piece of paper, weathered and worn. She found it pressed between the pages of a book and, in a language long since dead, it begins, _Dear Percy._

  


It ends with her name, and with love.

  
  
  
  


* * *

 

Some believe that humans are given four lives on this planet.

The first life is for planting seeds - it is a life of sowing, of laying down what will come to be. The second life is for water, for growth, for careful cultivation. In the third life, you reap, gather what has been and what will be. The last life is a life of punishment or of reward - you are left with whatever you have made for yourself.

It is no coincidence that the Reaper is often depicted with a scythe.

 

**92 CE**

Annabeth Chase meets Perseus Jackson on the day the first snow falls.

Later, Annabeth will remember very little about that day. She will remember the way the snow looked on the roof of the palace, which seemed to her to be large enough to consume the whole of the heavens. She will remember the way her father ducked his head when the emperor passed, even though the emperor was just a child - just a boy. She will remember that, when she did not bow, the emperor looked her dead in the eyes, and she will remember the chill that ran through her, all the way to her bones.

She will remember Perseus Jackson.

She will not remember how, exactly, she manages to sneak away from her father’s side, somewhere in the midst of meeting after dull meeting. How she skirts around a corner and finds herself staring into the sea-colored eyes of a boy her age, in simple, child-sized armor, holding a simple, child-sized sword. How they smuggle bread from the kitchen to split it, and how Perseus teaches her how to throw a knife after she teaches him how to parry.

But she will remember his smile, and his bright laugh, and how he doesn’t treat her like she’s delicate or foolish or small.

He treats her like an equal, and she will always, always remember that.

**100 CE**

She does not return to the capitol until years later, and under very different circumstances.

Instead of following her father the way she had last time, she follows a boy soldier, the only member of the imperial army who’d ever given her a chance to show her worth. Annabeth realizes the moment she meets him that destiny knows Nico di Angelo’s name. Even though he’s young and inexperienced, he rises through the military’s ranks faster than anyone Annabeth has ever met.

He fights like tragedy. Like war.

Nico’s battalion catches the emperor’s attention and they are summoned from the countryside to the capital. He brings his family, his household, his men. Annabeth almost wants to tell him not to, to warn him that the emperor’s palace is full of people with eyes and tongues sharper than swords, but how can you tell a general that you’re worried he’s destined to die?

They arrive at the palace to extravagant fanfare, and Nico bows low when he greets the emperor. Annabeth stays mostly upright, though, and sees the greed in the emperor’s face when he looks at Nico.

Like he is seeing a sword, rather than a boy.

She is following Nico out of the throne room when she spots a dark-haired guard standing close to the front of the room, near to the emperor’s side, where only the best and brightest are allowed. He is taller than she remembers, skin warm as teak and laced with new scars, but she recognizes the green of his eyes, the kindness in his face.

When their eyes meet, Percy’s mouth makes a startled little _o_ and she gives him a nod before leaving the room.

They run into each other again that night at dinner, and then again the next day in the gardens, and again in the evening as the sun dips below the horizon, and by their first month in the palace Annabeth has long since realized that whenever someone walks into a room, she always looks to see if it’s Percy.

**101 CE**

They are not friends, at first. Percy is an idiot, sometimes, and Annabeth too-bluntly lets him know it, and they spend most of their time together bickering. They come together naturally, though, in sparring sessions, at official events, at dinner, at dusk. More than anyone in the palace, Percy is easy to talk to; he’s funny, clever in a way that is very non-Annabeth, and doesn’t look at Annabeth like she’s an anomaly, like she’s a threat or a mistake or a problem that needs to be solved.

He makes her better, she thinks, than she used to be. He challenges her, frustrates her.

Annabeth Chase, first Lieutenant of Nico di Angelo’s army, falls in love with Percy Jackson with the same impetuous determination with which she does everything. And, slowly, Percy Jackson falls in love with her, too.

**102 CE**

Percy is promoted to head of the emperor’s guard only a few years after Annabeth first arrives at the palace. He accepts the position gratefully, with characteristic enthusiasm and effortless humility, and Annabeth is fiercely, fiercely proud of him until she remembers who he will be working under.

She knows, of course, that it is not her place to judge the emperor. It’s not even her place to be in a _room_ with him, unless he asks her to be. And when she asks Nico about him, Nico always says with complete honesty that he doesn’t think the emperor’s evil. A danger, he always says, not a threat, and Annabeth thinks she knows what he means.

Nico’s in the better position to judge, anyway, with the amount of time he spends in the emperor’s household. So she trusts him, and stays quiet, and watches Percy excel at his new position both with caution and with pride.

**104 CE**

When the emperor declares war on their neighbors to the east, no one in the capital is surprised.

The whispers had been circulating the palace for a long time, and Nico had warned Annabeth weeks ahead of time to be prepared to set out to the front immediately, should the need arise, so the letter she receives, stamped with the emperor’s official seal, comes as no shock.

She sits down hard on her bed, though, and turns the letter over in her hands before opening it. Just because she knew it was coming doesn’t mean it doesn’t settle heavy onto her shoulders, bear down hard on her lungs.

“You’re leaving,” is the first thing Percy says, when she goes to him.

“I have to,” Annabeth answers. “You know that.”

“I know that,” Percy confirms, and then he covers his face with a hand and says, “and I know better than to ask you to stay.”

They set off for the front lines the next evening, Nico astride a battle-horse the color of ink, Annabeth at his side. The emperor sees them off, and Annabeth doesn’t think she imagines the look he gives Nico as they turn to leave the city, like in his mind he’s set him on fire and is beginning to watch him burn.

“Will you be okay?” she asks Nico, once they’re on their way, and Nico’s gaze doesn’t waver from the road ahead.

“I have to be.”

**105 CE**

They get the news in winter, on a dizzyingly cold morning, the kind that makes breathing as painful as a wound. Nico and Annabeth ride back to the capital alone, to see what remains of Bianca di Angelo be buried into the ground.

It’s their first time back in the city in months, but Annabeth doesn’t see much of it. She spends most of her time making sure Nico’s eating, keeping an eye on him. On the third day of their stay, there’s a knock at the door, and Annabeth opens it to see the emperor’s younger brother, who’s standing outside awkwardly, shifting back and forth, like he’d forgotten how to be cold.

“Can I see him?” he asks, a little piteously, and several things click very quickly into place in Annabeth’s mind.

“You could take him his dinner,” she says, deadpan, and the emperor’s brother looks taken aback for only a moment before recovering and stepping forward to accept the tray from her hands.

“Your highness,” she says, before he can knock on Nico’s door. “Be careful.”

“With what? The soup?”

Annabeth sighs and bows to him before heading out the door and winding her way to the soldier’s barracks. Percy emerges before she can even call for him, and she lets him sweep her into an enormous hug, lets herself bury her face in the crook of his neck.

“Bianca,” he says, softly, but Annabeth shushes him gently.

“It’s not your fault,” she tells him.

“I gave her the mission,” he says. “I was in charge. I should’ve known something was wrong, that there’d be an ambush, she trusted me and I-”

“Percy,” she says. “No one blames you for this.”

“Nico does,” Percy says and Annabeth goes still.

“He won’t,” she tells him, “in time,” and Percy pulls her back into his arms.

They talk late into the night, getting caught up, splitting a loaf of bread like they had the day they met, when they were children. She asks about the city, he asks about the front, and they trace the new scars on each other’s skin with their fingertips and their noses and their lips.

“How’s the emperor?” she asks sleepily, in the pale-gray time just before dawn, her head pillowed on Percy’s arm.

“I don’t see him, much,” Percy says, and when she shoots him a look, he shrugs. “He’s got a war to win,” he says, but it feels like a half-truth, and they both know it.

Two days later, Annabeth and Nico return to the front lines. Before they leave, the emperor reaches out and grabs Nico’s arm, clutches too-tightly, hard enough that the perfect composure on Nico’s face shudders for a split second before snapping back into place.

“Remember where your loyalties lie,” the emperor says.

“I always have,” Nico answers.

They stare at each other for a long moment before Nico turns to his troops.

“Move out.”

**106 CE**

When the first order to seize land on the far side of the border comes through, Annabeth almost thinks nothing of it. And then they get another, and another. They are told to take no prisoners, to burn and salt the land that they take, to leave bodies strewn along roadways to prove as a message.

A sign.

Annabeth is worried.

(He won’t say it, but she knows Nico is, too.)

Between deployments, Annabeth tries to convince Percy to reason with the emperor. She tells him the violence is unending, that the orders are cruel, that this war is pointless, that they will all die for nothing.

Percy looks at her with wide eyes and says, “Annabeth, I believe you, and I wish there was something I could do, but… he’s the _emperor_.”

“Percy, he’s going to be the death of us all.”

“I won’t let it get that far,” Percy promises, solemnly. “For now, we’ve got to trust him. And if he hears you talking like this, we really will be dead.”

“Percy, please-”

“We can’t do this right now, Annabeth. Please, trust that we will do the right thing.”

And then one day she and Nico return for reinforcements, and Percy pulls her aside and looks at her with a coldness on his face she’s never seen before.

“Annabeth,” he says, his voice barely more than a breath, “the emperor told me.”

“What?” she asks. “He told you what?”

“Is it true?” he whispers, and it sounds like he’s close to tears, a frantic kind of fear in his voice. “He said that you and General di Angelo are planning a coup.”

“ _What_?” Annabeth gasps.

“I know that Nico blames me for Bianca’s death,” Percy says, miserably. “I blame me, too. But this isn’t the answer, Annabeth, you have to _know_ that.”

“Percy, please, you know that’s not it. I would never do something like that. Clearly the emperor isn’t in his right mind, and now he’s trying to turn us against each other-”

“I don’t know what to believe anymore,” Percy says, his voice hard. “You’ve been saying for months that the emperor’s orders are wrong.”

“Yes, and that’s because the emperor is going too _far_ , Percy, please, listen! He’s clearly sick, he needs to be stopped-”

Percy’s face goes icy and Annabeth knows, immediately, that she’s said the wrong thing.

“Percy,” she says, softly.

Percy says, “I can’t believe you’d do this.”

He storms out of the room and Annabeth stares after him, shocked and horrified and _furious_ , blindingly angry, at herself and at Percy and at the emperor and at the world.

It is the last time she will speak to Percy Jackson in this life.

**107 CE**

The next time Nico and Annabeth return to the capital, they are greeted by the emperor’s army, headed by Percy Jackson.

“We don’t have to do this,” Percy calls to Nico.

“You’re the one holding a sword on me,” Nico points out, his voice hard as shattered glass.

“Stand down,” Percy says, and Annabeth desperately searches his face for the man she knew, the man who loved her. “General, please, it doesn’t have to come to violence. All you have to do is lay down your weapons and atone for your crimes.”

“And what crimes would you be referring to?” Nico asks, his voice light.

“Seduction of the emperor’s brother,” Percy says, “with the intention of using him to steal the throne.”

Nico goes still.

“I have given my life,” he says, “for this country.”

“Then I will ask you to do so again,” the emperor’s voice says, from across the courtyard.

  
  


“Kill them.”

  
  
  


“ _No_ ,” Percy screams, but his voice is not loud enough to be heard over the battle cries.

  
  
  


Annabeth dies, but she does not die quiet. She dies with a sword in her hand, at her general’s side, and she dies looking into Percy’s horrified eyes, several guards holding him back from the fighting as he strains desperately to sprint to her side.

  
  
In the inner pocket of her jacket, she carries a letter marked with Percy’s name. _Dear Percy_ , it begins, and it ends with, _I will always love you_.

  
  
Forgive me.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(“You have always,” Nico says, “been afraid of the gods.”

He dies.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> longest chapter yet!! sorry Percy ^^;
> 
> I'm going to try to wrap this bad boy up in the next update (I'd like to keep it to 10 chaps since that seems like a good number to end on!!), but if bringing everything together ends up being too much for one part then I'll break it up into two. thank you as always for reading!! this project has really meant a lot to me!


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